The 7th Victim

ALSO BY ALAN JACOBSON

False Accusations

The Hunted

For my grandmother, Lily Silverman, ninety-seven at this writing and still climbing the five flights of stairs to her apartment . . . still refusing to take the elevator. Lily is an inspiration to everyone who’s ever met her, a woman who at ninety stood in front of a New York City bus and refused to move until the driver opened the door to let her in. Spunk. Wisdom. And a heart of platinum (apparently, literally). For now, we continue to celebrate your life. But when your time passes, you’ll be immortalized by those who knew you and were touched by your soul.

I love you the whole universe.

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“A profiler puts himself into the mind of the killer to see things as the killer saw them, to understand why he immersed his entire emotional and physical being into the fetid stench of human depravity. When a profiler explores the minutia of pain and death, he’s wading knee deep in the blood and guts, and there’s only so much he can take before it begins to affect him.”

—Mark Safarik, FBI profiler and Supervisory Special Agent (Ret.)

“To know the artist, study his art.”

—John Douglas, The Anatomy of Motive

prologue

SIX YEARS AGO

QUEENS, NEW YORK

“Dispatch, this is Agent Vail. I’m in position, thirty feet from the bank’s entrance. I’ve got a visual on three well-armed men dressed in black clothing, wearing masks. ETA on backup? I’m solo here. Over.”

“Copy. Stand by.”

Stand by. Easy for you to say. My ass is flapping in the breeze outside a bank with a group of heavily armed mercenaries inside, and you tell me to stand by. Sure, I’ll just sit here and wait.

FBI Special Agent Karen Vail was crouched behind her open car door, her Glock-23 forty-caliber sidearm steadied against the window frame. No match for what looked like MAC-10s the bank robbers were toting, but what can you do? Sometimes you’re just fucked.

Radio crackle. “Agent Vail, are you there? Over.”

No, I left on vacation. Leave a message. “Still here. No movement inside, far as I can tell. View’s partially blocked by a large window sign. Bank’s offering free checking, by the way.”

Vail hadn’t been involved in an armed response since leaving the NYPD five years ago. Back then she welcomed the calls, the adrenaline rush as she raced through the streets of Manhattan to track down the scumbags who were doing their best to add some spice to an otherwise bland shift. But after the birth of her son Jonathan, Vail decided the life of a cop carried too much risk. She eventually made it to the Bureau—a career advancement that had the primary benefit of keeping her keester out of the line of fire.

Until today.

“Local SWAT is en route,” the voice droned over the two-way. “ETA six minutes.”

“A lot of shit can happen in six minutes.” Did I say that out loud?

“Repeat, Agent Vail?”

“I said, ‘A lot of sittin’ for the next six minutes.’” The last thing she needed was to have her radio transmission played back in front of everyone; she’d be ridiculed for weeks.

“Unit Five approaching, Queens Boulevard and Forty-eighth.” Mike Hartman’s voice sounded unusually confident over the radio. Vail was surprised Mike and his new partner were responding to this call. She’d worked with Mike for six months and found him decent enough, but a marginal agent in terms of execution. At the moment, she’d take marginal execution . . . the more firepower the good guys had, the more likely the gunmen inside the bank would be intimidated, and the greater the odds of resolving this in the Bureau’s favor. Translation: she’d come out of this in one piece and the slimeballs would be wearing silver bracelets . . . tightened that one extra notch—just enough to make them wince when she ratcheted them down around their wrist bones, for all the trouble they caused her.

Dispatch replied: “Roger, Unit Five.”

Mike’s unit was a block away and would be here in seconds.

With her eyes focused on the bank’s windows, she heard Mike Hartman’s Bureau car screech to a stop to her left, about thirty feet from the front door. But as her head swung toward the BuCar to make eye contact with Mike, she heard the clank of metal on metal and she pivoted back toward the bank—

—where she saw the three armed men in black sweats blowing through the front door, large submachine guns tucked beneath their arms, and damned if she didn’t think she’d called it right, they were carrying MAC10s. But in the next split second, as she ducked down and as glass shattered and rained all over her back, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Mike Hartman lying on the ground, face up, his right arm tracing the pavement as if searching for something. A glimpse of his face showed raw pain and she knew instantly that he’d not lost anything but rather gained something—a few rounds of lead in his body. Still, Mike fared better than his partner, whose head hung limp, slumped back over the seat.

The bank robbers, machine guns and all, were arrayed in a triangle but not going anywhere, strategically positioned behind a mailbox and a row of metal newspaper dispensers, a pretty damn good bit of cover and a huge stroke of luck for them. But they’d just killed a cop—why weren’t they getting the hell out of Dodge?

Lying on the ground, with a bird’s-eye view of the pavement and Mike’s writhing body, Vail spied the cockeyed tires and sky blue rims of another vehicle, to the left of Mike’s BuCar. A local NYPD cruiser responding to the call. And where the hell was SWAT? Oh, yeah, six lonnnng minutes away. What did that make it, another four before they showed up? I told them a lot of shit can happen in six minutes.

Rounds continued popping all around her. Vail tried to stand—probably not the smartest thing to do while projectiles were zipping through the air at 950 feet per second, but she needed to do something.

As she rose, a couple of thumps struck her in the left thigh. The deep burn of a gunshot wound was instantly upon her, and a wide bloody circle spread through the nylon fibers of the stretch fabric of her tan pants. She didn’t have time for pain, not now. She grabbed the back of her leg and felt two tears in the fabric, indicating the rounds had gone right through. Assuming they didn’t hit a major artery, she’d be okay for a bit. But shit, right time or not, it sure hurt like hell.

She slithered to her left to gain a better view of what was happening in front of the bank—just as two of the slimebags dropped to the pavement . . . hit by the cops’ fire, no doubt. But the remaining asshole kept blowing rounds from his submachine gun, holding it like fucking Rambo, shooting from his waist and leaning back, hot brass jackets leaping from the weapon like they were angry at being expelled for something as mundane as murder.

The final cop went down—she could see him fall from her ground-level vantage point—and the perp stopped firing. The silence was numbing in its suddenness.

Vail watched as the man bent over and lifted the large canvas bag from his dead comrade’s hand and turned to hightail it down the street.

Well, this wasn’t good. Mike and his partner down, a couple cops dead, and the shithead was about to make it away with the cash. Not on my watch.

Vail rolled left, got prone against the ground and brought her Glock to the front of her body. This would be an insane shot—below the cars and above the curb—but what did she have to lose? With all the shooting, there were no innocents around. She squeezed off several rounds, the weapon bucking violently in her weak grip. And gosh darn it, if the fucker didn’t stumble, then limp—he was hit. Vail grabbed the edge of Mike’s car door and pulled herself up as best she could, her thigh burning like a red-hot poker, her muscles quivering as she groaned and pushed with her right leg to get herself upright.

Hanging onto the sideview mirror with her left hand, she took aim at the limping gunman and screamed, “Federal Agent. Freeze!”

Did that ever work? Nah. Usually not. But this guy wasn’t too smart, because he turned toward her, his submachine gun still in his grasp, and that was all she needed.

Vail fired again and took him out cold, flattened him against the pavement. And then let go of her hold on the mirror and joined him in a heap on the asphalt as she heard the uneven scream of sirens approaching.

She craned her neck back a smidgen and caught Mike Hartman’s pale gaze. He managed a slight smile before his eyes wavered closed.

The next morning, after her release from the hospital, she put in for a transfer.

one

PRESENT DAY

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA

Wisps of vapor hung in the frigid night air like frightened ghosts. He shooed away the apparitions, then checked his watch as he huffed down the dark residential street. He’d chosen this house, this victim, for a reason.

Within a few hours, pale-faced neighbors would be staring into news cameras, microphones shoved in their faces for commentary and insight. Tell us about her. Stir our emotions, make us cry. Make our hearts bleed. Make our hearts bleed just like the victim bled.

His right hand was toasty warm, curled around the leather FBI credentials case inside his coat pocket. But his suit pants were too thin to fight off the biting cold that nipped at his legs. He shivered and quickened his pace. In a moment, he’d be indoors, comfortably at home with his work.

At home with his victim. Flowing brunet hair and clear skin. Long legs and a turned up cute-as-a-button nose. But buried beneath the allure, the evil was there—he’d seen it in her eyes. The eyes were always the key.

Strong fingers palpated his fake moustache to ensure it was properly placed. He repositioned the small pipe holstered to the inside of his coat, then placed the loose-leaf binder beneath his left arm before stepping up to the front door. He’d been here a number of times over the past few days, inspecting the area. Watching the comings and goings of the neighbors. Measuring the arcs thrown by the streetlights. Gauging the visibility of the front door to passersby. Now it was a matter of flawless execution. Execution! Indeed.

He pressed the doorbell and brightened his face for the peephole. Rule number one: look pleasant and nonthreatening. Just a friendly FBI agent out to ask a few questions to keep the neighborhood safe.

An eye swallowed the small lens. “Who is it?”

Sweet voice. How deceiving these women-slut-whores can be.

“FBI, ma’am. Agent Cox.” He had to keep himself from smiling at the irony of the name he’d chosen. Like everything he did, there was a reason. Everything for a reason and a reason for everything.

He unfurled the credentials case the way agents are taught to do, then leaned back a bit, helping her take in the whole package. A clean-cut FBI agent in a wool overcoat and suit. How easy could it be?

A second’s hesitation, then the door opened. The woman wore an oversize sweatshirt and a pair of threadbare jeans. She held a spatula in her right hand, a dishrag in the left. Cooking a late dinner. Her last supper, he cackled silently.

“Ms. Hoffman, we’ve had some reports of a rapist in your area. His attacks are escalating. We were wondering if you could help us.”

“A rapist?” pretty little Melanie Hoffman asked. “I haven’t heard anything about it.”

“We haven’t released it to the press, ma’am. We work differently than the police. We believe it’s best to keep it quiet, so we don’t tip him off that we’re on to him.” He shifted his feet and blew on his right hand as he hugged the binder close to his chest with his left. It’s cold, he was telling her. Invite me inside.

“How can I help?”

“I have a book of mug shots here. All I need you to do is look over the photos and let me know if you’ve seen any of these people in the neighborhood the past two months. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

Her eyes bounced from the binder to his face, on which she seemed to linger for just a bit longer than he would have liked. He decided to press ahead. He had a knack for creating a window of opportunity, and the window was now open. He had to move, and move fast.

“Ma’am, I don’t mean to be impolite, but I’ve still got a number of other houses to visit tonight, and it’s getting kind of late.” He shrugged a shoulder. “And the longer it takes to find this guy, the more women he’s going to attack.”

Melanie Hoffman lowered her spatula and stepped aside. “Of course. I’m sorry. Please, come in.”

HE SNAPPED HIS SHEARS CLOSED and lopped off a lock of brunet hair. He leaned back, admired his work, then grabbed Melanie Hoffman’s limp head by her remaining hair and clipped off another handful. Then another. And another.

Snip. Snip. Snip.

The sweet scent of blood was everywhere. He sucked it in and shivered. It was an intense feeling, a sudden euphoric rush.

When he finished with her hair, he moved on to her fingernails. Down to the quick, and beyond. Blood oozed a bit, and he licked it, like a lover slowly lapping off the chocolate from his companion’s fingers. He repositioned Melanie’s hand, got it just the way he wanted it, then brought the shears up again.

Clip. Clip. Clip.

Blood oozed again, and he drank some more.

An hour must’ve passed, the need to make things right driving him to perfection. He’d always been like that, for as long as he could remember. Besides, he was in no rush to go back out to the cold. He snatched a sesame seed bun from Melanie Hoffman’s kitchen counter and slapped on some cream cheese, peanut butter, and ketchup from her fridge. He squirted on a generous helping—the symbolic affection for the red stuff wasn’t lost on him—and he took a large bite, careful not to leave any crumbs, saliva, or other identifiable markings behind.

A soft, tan leather couch that still smelled new sat in the living room. He sunk down into it and flipped on the television, surfed the channels for a bit and found wrestling. Such senseless violence. How could they allow this junk on TV?

He left the tube on and sauntered through the rest of the house, munching on the sandwich and admiring the pictures hanging on the wall. He liked Melanie’s taste in artwork. It had a looseness to it, abstract yet somehow structured. Organized, but with a randomness inherent in creative expression. He stood in front of one of the paintings and noticed her signature in the corner. She had created these herself. He clucked his tongue against his palate. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Too bad. He wondered what other works of beauty she might have created had she not been so damned evil.

He stood in the bedroom doorway admiring his work. He finished off the sandwich, then crossed his arms and tilted his head from side to side, finding the right perspective, sizing up the room. Taking in the whole view. Yes, it was a masterpiece. As good as anything Melanie had painted. The most complex work he’d ever created.

He moved to Melanie’s side and looked down at her eyes, frozen open, staring at the ceiling. No, at him. They were looking at him.

The evil had to be purged. Had to be. Had to.

He lifted the serrated knife and felt its weight—its power—in his hand. Melanie Hoffman had paid dearly, for sure. Just payback for an unjust crime.

It was, it was, it was.

Like a master painter inscribing his name at the bottom of a canvas, he brought back the knife and drove it through Melanie Hoffman’s left eye socket.

She must not see.

She must not.

She must.

two

What is it with me and banks?

Supervisory Special Agent Karen Vail’s weapon was aimed at the loser, who just stood there, his .38 Special pointing right at her. Sweat pimpled his greasy forehead, matting dirty black hair to his skin. His hands were shaking, his eyes were bugged out like golf balls, and his breathing was rapid.

“Don’t move or I’ll blow your goddamn head off!” Vail yelled it a bit louder than she’d intended, but the adrenaline was pumping. She wanted the message to get through the perp’s thick skull that she meant business. The frightened patrons of Virginia Commonwealth Savings Bank got the message. Those who were still standing hit the ground with a thud.

“Drop the fucking gun,” the man screamed back. “Drop it now!”

Vail smirked. That’s exactly what I was going to say to him. As he shuffled his feet and held the hostage in the crook of his left arm, Vail flashed on Alvin, a skel she’d busted sixteen years ago while a member of the NYPD. It wasn’t Alvin—he was doing time at Riker’s Island—but, nonetheless, she thought he could be the guy’s twin.

“I’m not putting my gun down till you put yours down, pal,” Vail said to the perp. “That’s the way it’s going to work.”

“I call the fucking shots here, bitch. Not you!”

Great, she thought, I got one who wants to fight. It’d been six years since she’d been a field agent, eleven years since she’d camped behind a detective shield. Though she still trusted her instincts, her skill-set was in the crapper. It wasn’t like putting on pantyhose every morning. Dealing with hostage situations took practice to know you’d do the right thing under pressure, without thinking. As Vail had often been kidded by the others in her squad, the “without thinking” part came naturally to her.

“Since you won’t tell me your name, I’m going to call you Alvin,” she said. “Is that okay, Alvin?”

“I don’t care what the fuck you call me, just drop the fucking gun!” He shuffled his feet some more, his eyes darting from the left side of the room to the right, and back. As if he were watching a table tennis match.

Alvin’s hostage, a thirty-something stringy blond with a sizable rock on her ring finger, began whimpering. Her eyes were bugged out, too, but it wasn’t from drugs. It was raw fear, the sudden realization that, FBI or not, Vail might not get her out of this alive.

And Vail had to admit that so far it was not going well. She’d already blown protocol about as well as any rookie could her first day on the job. She should’ve yelled “Freeze, scumbag, FBI!” and he would have then just pissed his pants and dropped the gun, surrendering to law enforcement and ending the nightmare before it started. At least, that’s the way it always happened in the old TV shows she watched as a kid.

But this was reality, or at least it was for Vail. For the Alvin look-alike standing in front of her, it was some speed-induced frenzy, a dream where he could do anything he wanted, and not get hurt.

That was the part that bothered her.

She kept her Glock locked tightly in her hands, lining up Alvin’s nose in her sight. He was only about twenty feet away, but the woman he was holding, or rather choking with his left arm, was too close for Vail to risk a shot.

The other part of protocol she’d screwed up was that she should’ve been talking calmly to Alvin, so as not to incite him. But that was according to the Manual of Investigative and Operational Guidelines—known throughout the Bureau as MIOG, or “my-og.” In Vail’s mind, it should’ve been called MIOP, short for myopic. Narrow-minded. And if there was one thing Vail was sure of at the moment, it was that the guy who wrote MIOG didn’t have a crazed junkie pointing a snub-nosed .38 at him.

So they stood there, Alvin twitching and shuffling, doing what looked like a peculiar slow dance with his hostage, and the level-headed Karen Vail, practicing what was sometimes called a Mexican standoff. Was that a politically correct term? She didn’t know, nor did she care. There was no backup outside, no tactical sniper focusing his Redfield variable scope on Alvin’s forehead, awaiting the green light to fire. She’d just walked into the bank to make a deposit, and now this.

She let her eyes swing to Alvin’s left, to a spot just over his shoulder. She quickly looked back to him . . . making it seem as if she’d seen someone behind him, about to sneak up and knock him over the head. She saw his eyes narrow, as if he’d noticed her momentary glance. But he didn’t take the bait, and for whatever reason kept his ping-pong gaze bouncing to either side of Vail. She realized she needed to be more direct.

She turned her head and looked to his left again and, reaching into her distant past as a one-time drama major, shouted (deeply, from the abdomen), “No, don’t shoot!”

Well, this got Alvin’s attention, and as he swiveled to look over his left shoulder, he yanked the hostage down and away, and Vail drilled the perp good. Right in the temple. As he was falling to the ground in slow mo, she was asking herself, “Was this a justified shooting?”

Actually, she was telling herself to get the hell over there and kick away his weapon. She couldn’t care less if it was a justified shooting. The FBI’s OPR unit—Office of Professional Responsibility, or Office of Paper-pushing Robots—would make the final call on that. The hostage, though frazzled and rough around the edges, was alive. That was all that mattered at the moment.

Once Vail knocked aside Alvin’s weapon, she took a moment to get a closer look at his face. At this angle he didn’t look so much like Alvin. Could’ve been because he had the blank deer-in-headlights death mask on, or because of the oozing bullet hole on the side of his head. Hard to say.

Vail suddenly became aware of the commotion amongst the tellers and security guards, who had emerged from their hiding places. The hostage was now shrieking and blabbering something unintelligible. A man in a gray suit was by her side, attempting to console her.

“Don’t just stand there,” Vail yelled to the closest guard. “Call 911 and tell them an officer needs assistance.”

It wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t exactly a lie, either. Still, she thought the cops would come faster if they thought it was one of their own who needed help instead of an FBI agent. Sometimes they don’t like fibbies much, the locals. But with banks, the police had to share jurisdiction with the Bureau, so she didn’t anticipate much of a tiff over it.

As she stepped away from Alvin’s body, her BlackBerry’s vibrating jolt made her jump. She yanked it from her belt and glanced at the display. Her intestines tightened. Her heart, still racing from adrenaline, precipitously slowed. The brief text message sucked the air from her breath.

She had hoped she’d never see another day like this. She had hoped it was over.

But the Dead Eyes killer had claimed another victim.

three

In six years as an FBI profiler, Karen Vail had not experienced anything quite like this. She had seen photos of decomposed corpses, eviscerated bodies, bodies without heads or limbs. Seven years as a cop and homicide detective in New York City had shown her the savages of gang killings and drive-by shootings, children left parentless, and a system that often seemed more interested in politics than in the welfare of its people.

But the brutal details of this crime scene were telling. A thirty-year-old woman lost her life in this bedroom, a woman who seemed to be on the verge of a promising career as an accountant. A box of new business cards from the firm of McGinty & Pollock was sitting on her kitchen counter, the toxic odor of printing press ink burning Vail’s nose.

She curled a wisp of red hair behind her right ear and knelt down to examine a bloody smear outside the bedroom doorway.

“Whoever did this is one sick fuck.” Vail said it under her breath, but Fairfax County homicide detective Paul Bledsoe, who had suddenly materialized at her side, grunted. The baritone of his voice nearly startled her. Nearly startled her, because there weren’t many things that did surprise her these days.

“Aren’t they all,” Bledsoe said. He was a stocky man, only about five-eight, but plenty wide in the shoulders to make anyone think twice about screwing with him. Deep-set dark eyes and short, side-parted black hair over an olive complexion gave him the look of Italian stock. But he was a mutt, some Greek and some Spanish, a distant Irish relative thrown in for good luck.

His trained eyes took in the large amount of blood that had been sprayed and smeared, just about painted all over the walls of Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom. Melanie Hoffman, former newcomer, now dearly departed, recently of the firm McGinty & Pollock.

All Vail could do was nod. Then, as she crouched down to get a different perspective on the scene, she realized that Bledsoe was only partially correct. “Some are more fucked up than others,” she said. “It’s just a matter of degree.”

The photographer’s flash flickered off the mirrors in the adjacent bathroom and drew Vail’s attention. Without walking through the crime scene, she glanced up and saw that blood had also been smeared on the bathroom walls, at least the parts of them she could see.

Profilers didn’t usually get to visit fresh crime scenes. They did most of their work secluded in a small office, poring over police reports, photos, written or transcribed suspect interviews, victim histories culled from relatives, friends, acquaintances. VICAP forms—short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—that were completed by the investigating homicide detectives provided background and perspective. Having as much information as possible was crucial before beginning their work . . . before beginning their journey into the depths of a sick mind.

“So you got my text.” Bledsoe was looking at her, expecting a response.

“When I saw the code for Dead Eyes, my heart just about stopped.”

Another flash from the camera grabbed Vail’s attention. They had both been standing near the doorway, seemingly in no hurry to step into the chamber of death.

“Well, shall we?” she asked. He didn’t reply, and she figured he was mesmerized, if not overwhelmed, by the brutality that lay before them. She sometimes had a hard time reading Bledsoe and, over the years, had concluded that he preferred it that way . . . erecting a wall between his inner thoughts and someone who made her living analyzing human behavior.

As Vail tiptoed around eviscerated body parts strewn across the floor, the criminalist poked his head out of the shower. “There’s more in here, Detective,” he said to Bledsoe, who had moved beside Vail.

“Peachy,” Vail said. As Bledsoe headed into Melanie Hoffman’s bathroom, she took a deep breath and cleared her mind, descending into the funk she needed to get into to begin her analysis.

Profilers didn’t try to identify who committed the murder, as the police did; they tried to ascertain the type of person most likely to have perpetrated the act. What their motivations were; why now, why here, why this victim. Each one a crucial question, an important piece to the puzzle.

There were cops who thought profiling was bullshit, psychobabble crap that wasn’t worth the paper their reports were written on, and certainly not worth the salary the Bureau paid, plus benees, car, and clothing allowance. That talk never bothered Vail, because she knew they were wrong. She knew that, for some cops, it was a simple inferiority complex, while for others it was merely ignorance about what profilers did.

Vail continued to study Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom. Several things bothered her about this murder. She turned to Bledsoe, who was busy puking into a barf bag he carried in his pocket. She’d seen him do this before, the last time at a particularly bloody crime scene. It was a strange thing to happen to a homicide detective, but when Vail asked him about it, he shook it off the way he brushed aside an opinion he didn’t like: with the shrug of a large shoulder. Bledsoe had said it wasn’t anything he controlled, it just kind of happened. He thought it had something to do with an “autonomic response” related to the smell of blood. Vail thought it was baloney, but what did she know? Maybe it was true, or maybe it was just male ego trying to cover up an embarrassing weakness. At the time, he seemed to want Vail to ignore it, so she did.

Vail poked her head in the bathroom and forged ahead. Bledsoe straightened up, borrowed a plastic bag from the criminalist, and sealed off his sour stomach contents. He wiped his lips with a folded paper towel he pilfered from the technician’s utility case, then popped a Certs in his mouth. He maneuvered the breath mint toward his cheek, then nodded at the wall above the mirror. “What do you make of that?”

Scrawled in large red strokes were the words, “It’s in the.”

“Could mean a lot of things.”

“Such as?”

Vail shrugged. “I’ll need to think on it. I’m not sure we know enough yet to even formulate an opinion.”

“You said it could mean a lot of things. You’ve gotta have some idea about it.”

“First off, it’s not necessarily what he wrote as much as why he felt the need to write it.”

Bledsoe chewed on that a moment, then shook his head. “You guys are gonna have a field day with that one.”

“No doubt.” Vail stepped out of the bathroom. “Okay, what’ve we got?”

“No signs of forced entry,” Bledsoe said. “Vic could’ve known her attacker.”

Vail looked away, her gaze coming to rest on Melanie’s blood-soaked bed. “Could’ve met the guy yesterday evening and brought him home. Or, he could’ve used a ruse to lower her defenses. Enough to get her to open the door for him. Either way, your assumption that she knew him wouldn’t do us much good.”

Bledsoe grunted, then stepped out of the bathroom.

Profilers often found it difficult to have a relationship with someone, let alone have a family. They constantly thought about crime scene photos, wondering what they’d missed—or even what they had seen and misinterpreted. Or what they expected to see but didn’t. It was a perpetual state of unease, like when you keep thinking you’ve forgotten something but can’t figure out what it is.

But, it was Vail’s job and she did it the best she could. At present, she hoped she did it well enough to help catch Dead Eyes. After three murders spread out over five months, the killer had gone silent. For several months, there was nothing. When such a pattern developed, the police figured—or rather, hoped—the offender had either died, or was sitting in a maximum security jail cell, arrested on some unrelated charge.

When doubt intensified that the third victim was the work of Dead Eyes, it left the offender with only two murders to his credit. He suddenly didn’t appear to be as prolific, and thus the threat he posed was not as potent. With escalating police department budgets always a concern, the task force was mothballed.

For Vail, it was good timing: nine months of working in close proximity with Bledsoe was enough. Vail liked him, but anytime you were around someone so much, you tended to make that person’s problems your own. And with a failed marriage—and serial killers bouncing around inside her head—she had enough stress without Bledsoe’s issues invading her thoughts as well.

Vail knelt beside Melanie Hoffman’s bloody, mutilated corpse and sighed. “Why did this happen to you?”

four

Vail stood at the foot of Melanie Hoffman’s bed. After the criminalist briefed her on his findings, Vail asked Bledsoe to leave her for a few moments so she could be alone with her thoughts. Alone with the corpse. Some would think this was a morbid request, but for a profiler it was a priceless advantage.

As a new agent going through training, Vail had read all the papers written by the original FBI profilers, Hazelwood, Ressler, Douglas, and Underwood. For a profiler, getting inside the offender’s head was exciting, almost sexy. The way they figured things out, the way they could put their finger on the offender’s personality traits was uncanny. What a rush it must be, she had thought, to write up a summary of an UNSUB, or unknown subject as the Bureau’s procedural manual calls them, and discover later that not only did your assessment help nail the killer, but that it was spot on.

As was usually the case, in practice things were a lot different than it seemed they would be. The romantic notions of catching a serial killer were long gone. Vail spent her time in the trenches where psychotic criminals roamed, peering into minds of men who deserved to be gassed. Better yet, to be sliced and diced and tortured like they often did to their victims.

Vail settled into a chair in the corner of Melanie Hoffman’s room and took in the scene, looking at its entirety. The blood all over the walls, the grotesque mutilation of the victim. She slipped a hand into her pocket and removed a container of Mentholatum and rubbed the gel across her top lip, masking the metallic blood odor and reek of expressed bodily fluids.

As she sat there, she tried to get into the mind-set of the killer. Though there were a couple dozen FBI profilers who traveled the world educating law enforcement personnel on what profiling could and could not do, word of mouth was slow. And defunct TV shows, where the FBI agent could “see through the killer’s eyes” only made their job of education more difficult, their credibility more suspect.

Two years ago, a cop asked Vail to touch a piece of the victim’s clothing so she could “see” the killer’s face and describe it to him. He seemed genuinely disappointed when she told him that was not the way it worked.

In reflection, Vail now found herself smiling. In the middle of a brutal crime scene, she was smiling. Smiling at the stupidity of the cop, at the irony and ineptitude of her own skills at times, and how sometimes she could not see even the obvious tangible things right in front of her . . . let alone phantom images through a killer’s eyes. Profilers don’t see what the offender sees. But they do symbolically get inside his head, think like he does, imagine what he felt at the time of the murder—and why.

But that was not to say she did not get something from being in the same room as the killer. She did, though she had never been able to classify these feelings, be they intuition, an intense perception or understanding or identification with the offender and what she thought he’d felt at the time. But whenever possible, she spent a few moments alone with the body. It beat color photos, videotape, and written descriptions.

She shifted her attention back to the victim. To Melanie—Vail always felt it was better to use their names. It kept it personal, reminded her that someone out there did this horrible thing to a real, living, formerly breathing human being. It was too easy to slip into the generic “vic,” or victim reference, and sometimes she wondered if the law enforcement brain did it by necessity, as a self-protection mechanism against emotional overload . . . the mind’s way of forcing them to keep a distance. To stay sane.

Bledsoe’s comment that the killer might have known his victim, if correct, would mean it was a relatively easy murder to have committed. The offender could get close to her without much difficulty. And if he’d gotten to know her so he could increase her comfort levels and decrease her defense mechanisms, that said a lot. It meant this killer was smart, that he had spent considerable time planning his crime. If that was the case, it would indicate an organized offender.

A crime scene was often a mixture of the two—elements of organization blended with elements of disorganization—making the UNSUB’s identification harder. Though Vail had initially thought Dead Eyes was more disorganized than organized, she was beginning to have doubts.

Vail heard a noise in the hallway, followed by a loud voice: “Yo! Where’s the dick that bleeds?”

“In here, Mandisa,” Bledsoe called from the bathroom. He opened the door and stepped out just as Spotsylvania County Detective Mandisa Manette, one of the former Dead Eyes Task Force members, entered. Manette was a lanky woman with broad shoulders and a smile that stretched across her face. Cornrows lifted off her head and stuck out like a loose bundle of ropes that bounced when she walked. She always wore platform shoes, a move Vail felt was aimed more at power and control than fashion. With the added height, she hit six feet and was a good three inches taller than Vail. Vail had come to think it was Manette’s way of keeping Vail one notch below her in the pecking order.

Vail pulled herself out of the chair and tried to bring her mind back into a state capable of socializing. She reached the doorway in time to see Manette’s reaction to Melanie Hoffman’s demise.

“How you doing, Mannie?” Bledsoe gave her a quick hug. Vail had not seen Manette since the task force had been suspended—and judging by their reactions, she figured Bledsoe hadn’t either.

“How’s my favorite dick hanging?” Manette asked Bledsoe.

Vail cringed. She was no prude, but after a while, the sexual innuendoes wore thin.

“Divorce is in the books,” Bledsoe said. “Trying to move on.”

“You deserve better, Blood. You do.” She grabbed a hunk of Bledsoe’s ample cheek and squeezed. “Maybe a fine thing like me would consider taking on a work like you.”

Bledsoe turned a bit crimson and rolled his eyes.

Manette threw a hand up to her chest in mock surprise at seeing Vail. “Kari! My least favorite shrink. Still lookin’ for that trapdoor that’ll take you into the killer’s mind?”

Vail turned away, preferring not to get into it with Manette. “I’ll be back in five,” she said to Bledsoe. She walked out of the house, moving beyond the crime scene tape to clear her mind and regain her concentration. The smell of death was rank, even with Mentholatum on her lip, and stealing some brisk, moist air of a misty winter day provided a needed respite.

Lacking a caffeine-laced soft drink, Vail bummed a Marlboro from a nearby technician and lit it. She had given up the awful habit when she left Deacon—considering it part of his curse—and hadn’t smoked since. She tugged on the end and sucked in her fix of stimulant. After blowing a few rings in the air and snubbing out the barely smoked cigarette, she saw a car pull up across the street, behind two parked police cruisers. Acura, late model, navy blue. Too pricey for an unmarked, unless it was left over from a search and seizure.

The driver leaned forward and Vail got a clear view of the man, despite the high gray sky reflecting off the tinted glass. She stormed back into the house and sought out Bledsoe.

“What the hell is Hancock doing here?”

Bledsoe twisted away from Manette. “Hancock?”

“Chase Hancock. Arrogant, pain-in-the-ass SOB.”

“Don’t hold back, Kari. Tell us what you really think of him.”

Vail opened her mouth to respond, but the electronic tone of Beethoven’s Fifth interrupted her.

Bledsoe rooted a cell phone from his jacket pocket and answered the call. He shook his head, walked a few feet away, and appeared to put up a mild protest. Seconds later, he disconnected the call, then threw a furrowed look at Vail.

“Well, well, well. Karen Vail, Paul Bledsoe, and . . . who is this lovely creature I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting?” Trim but thick, with a mound of slicked back blond hair, sky blue eyes, and a divot of a dimple in a square chin, Chase Hancock was all smiles. His extended right hand hung in the air in front of Manette.

Manette looked Hancock over and nodded her approval, but she did not offer her hand in acknowledgment—thus making her assessment known: she did not care for anything else other than the physical package.

“Interesting name, Hancock,” Manette mused. “Kind of sounds like—”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Vail asked.

“He’s here on order of Chief Thurston.”

Vail’s frown shifted toward Bledsoe. “What?”

Bledsoe looked away. “Hancock’s been named to the task force. Just got the call,” he said, holding up his cell phone.

With Vail’s fisted hands turning white, Bledsoe led her out to the front of the house. “Let’s take a walk,” he said as they stepped onto the cement path that fed the sidewalk.

“Did you think I might hit him?”

“I never know with you sometimes.”

Vail shoved her hands into her coat pockets. “Just because I hate the guy?”

“He’s got an ego the size of DC, that’s pretty damn obvious. But what’d he do to you?”

“Before he hooked on with Senator Linwood’s security detail, Hancock was a field agent for a dozen years.”

“He was a fibbie?”

“Don’t call us that.”

“You call us dicks.”

“Only because some of you are.” Vail nudged Bledsoe playfully with a shoulder. He rocked a bit onto the neighbor’s front lawn before regaining his balance. “Anyway, Hancock applied for the open position at the profiling unit same time I did. I’d worked a couple of crossover cases with him and his work was, well, shitty. I mentioned it to my partner, who told my ASAC. Next thing, I get the promotion, Hancock doesn’t.”

“You’re giving yourself a lot of credit if you think the Bureau was swayed by your opinion, Karen.”

“They weren’t. My ASAC swore he never said anything to anyone about what my partner told him. But Hancock knows I thought his work was shitty, and my field reports didn’t pull any punches. I called a spade a spade, basically saying Hancock’s an incompetent idiot. He thinks he got passed over because of me.” She drew in a deep breath and sighed. “He threw a fit, brought a discrimination suit, left the Bureau.”

“He win the case?”

“Nah, it was bullshit. Judge threw it out.”

They stopped walking and looked around at the quiet residential street. Modest, well-kept one- and two-story brick houses sat like silent witnesses to the recent murder.

“How long ago was this?”

“Little over six years. Word was he found a spiffy job in the private sector doing security work for some Internet company.”

Bledsoe kicked at a rock. “And now he heads up Linwood’s security detail.”

“Pretty boy found a new roost.”

“Hey, it works for Linwood. The senator gets a relatively young guy with a dozen years in the Bureau. Asshole or not, that’s good experience to have on your side.”

Vail shivered and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “So why did Chief Thurston get involved? What’s his stake in all this?”

“Don’t know. Sounded important to him. Something important enough to pull strings.”

Vail turned and started heading back. “Something? Or someone.”

Bledsoe pursed his lips, then nodded.

WHEN THEY RETURNED to Melanie Hoffman’s house, Hancock and Mandisa Manette were huddled over the victim’s body with Bubba Sinclair, a detective from the FCPD, Fairfax City Police Department. Sinclair, head shaved bald and his face peppered with scars from childhood acne, was nodding at something Manette had said. When he saw Vail, he stood from his crouch and smiled. “Hey shrink, how goes it?”

“Good, Sin, good. Except we got us another Dead Eyes vic.”

Sinclair nodded. “This one’s real bad. Worse than before. Sure it’s our guy?”

“Signature’s right on. Vics done in their beds, their own steak knives rammed right through the eyes. Organs eviscerated. Left hand severed. Blood smeared on the walls. Afterwards, offender takes in a meal at the scene, watches the tube. Want me to go on?”

Sinclair shook his head. “Nah, enough for now.”

Manette’s arms were resting on her hips. “Looks just like them other vics. One and two.”

Vail knew this was a slap at her opinion that victim number three was also one of Dead Eyes’s jobs, even though the crime scenes looked markedly different from the previous two. Different even from Melanie Hoffman’s.

“I’ll need to get up to speed,” Hancock said. “Review all the files. Victimologies, photos, interviews—”

“We know what’s in the files, Hancock,” Vail said.

Bledsoe held up a hand to keep the peace. “Task force is my responsibility. I’ll make sure you get what you need.”

Hancock nodded, rocked on his heels, and threw a sideways glance at Vail.

“So how’d you pull this assignment?” Manette asked.

“Simple,” Hancock said. “I asked for it.”

Manette’s head jutted back. “Who you with?”

Vail grunted, then turned to walk away. “He’s not a LEO.”

“Not law enforcement?” Manette looked from Hancock to Bledsoe. “Don’t you be telling me he’s a reporter—”

“Agent Chase Hancock.” He again extended a hand toward Manette, but again she ignored it and instead turned to Vail.

“Agent Hancock? He’s one of yours?”

“I’m agent-in-charge of Senator Linwood’s security detail,” Hancock said. “The senator’s appalled over this offender’s boldness and is shocked by the ineptitude of local law enforcement in catching this guy.” He looked at Vail. “Including the FBI.”

Sinclair stepped forward. “What gives you the right—”

“I’ve got an idea,” Bledsoe said. “How about we get back to the crime scene? In other words, do what we get paid to do. We can powwow later and lay our thoughts on the table then.”

That quieted the group and, despite a grumble from Hancock, they dispersed.

Vail made her way over to Melanie Hoffman’s body and stood there, letting her eyes move from the bare feet up to the head. Staring at the protruding knives . . . wondering: Was she dead when he plunged them into her brain? If she was like the other two victims, the answer would be yes. What was the significance of stabbing the eyes? Was it sexual in nature? And what was the meaning of the message the offender left on the wall?

A knock at the door interrupted the background clicks and flashes of the criminalists’ cameras. “Hey everybody.” In walked Roberto Enrique Umberto Hernandez, the six-foot-seven Vienna Police Department Detective whose small-town murder case gave birth to the Dead Eyes killer. Vail met him at the doorway and they hugged briefly.

“Karen, how’ve you been?” He looked over at Bledsoe, who tipped his head back in acknowledgment. Manette reached over and touched her fist to Robby’s. “What’s up?” Robby asked Manette.

“I think we should stop meeting like this. Take in dinner, a movie instead.” Manette ran her hand across his thick forearm and winked at him. Even with his darker complexion, Vail could swear that Robby blushed.

Robby had gotten into law enforcement for the same reason many cops had, because of the violent death of a loved one. In his case, his uncle, who had served as a surrogate father. Robby had witnessed the killing himself, a particularly brutal job carried out by gang members. His uncle was an honest, hardworking man, and why he would be a gang target Robby never understood. But it changed Robby’s life in ways he could not anticipate. Like upping in the LAPD. That turned some heads in the old ’hood, especially when he made detective and was stationed in the Pico District, LA’s premier Hispanic gang neighborhood.

But even though Robby had a gentle soul, at six-seven, with a square jaw and deep-set eyes, his body language said, “Don’t fuck with me.” To hear Robby tell it, not many did. Vail was inclined to believe him.

Robby’s eyes found Melanie Hoffman’s body, and his shoulders sagged forward. He cleared his throat.

“Roll up your sleeves and dig in,” Vail said.

The next half hour passed without much discussion. The crime scene unit continued their work, and the task force did theirs. Robby broke away from the trio of detectives and crouched next to Vail as she studied the congealed pool of blood beside the bed.

“I’m thinking of applying to the Academy.” Robby said it near her right ear, barely above a whisper, but it snagged her full attention.

Vail’s eyebrows rose. “Yeah? Had enough of Pocatello?”

“Vienna’s a small town. Not a whole lot to do, you know? Counting the Dead Eyes vic, three murders in fourteen years.”

“A waste of your talents?”

Robby shrugged. “I guess you could put it that way. Just so many robberies, car thefts, and dom vio’s you can take before you’re staring out the window, hoping for something more . . . challenging. Sounds bad, huh?”

Though Vail hadn’t known him all that long, she had come to learn that Robby was very intuitive. When they first started working Dead Eyes, she found they could talk to each other without words, and often did.

“Why the Bureau? Why not apply for a slot with Bledsoe’s department? Plenty of action there.”

“I was thinking about profiling.”

Vail gave a sideways glance at Hancock, who appeared to be listening with half an ear. She took Robby’s elbow and rose from her crouch. “Let’s go get some air.”

They moved outside, and the chill struck her body like a slap to the face. She sunk her hands into her pants pockets and walked over to the curb. “You know, Robby, there’s another option. The International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship. It’s a two-year understudy training program. You’d have to be sponsored by an agency, one that’s big like Bledsoe’s. You’d spend the last month with my unit, then take a test. You could then do profiling for the police department.”

Robby shrugged, then said, “Not quite the same.”

Vail nodded. “Okay, but you can’t just apply for the profiling unit. You have the street experience, but you’ve got to be an agent for a while. You know, pay your dues, meet some pretty rigid criteria. There are a lot of candidates for very few openings.”

“You don’t think I have the talent.”

“I didn’t say that. From what I’ve seen, I think you’ve got great natural instincts. But it’s a lot more than that. A good profiler is open-minded. He can see the big picture and keep his feelings and emotions in check. He needs to be able to look at a scene and instantly analyze things logically: why did the offender do this—or not do that? He has to be able to think like the offender. I haven’t really assessed you in those terms. I’d need to work more cases with you before I could say you’ve got all the tools.”

“My mom’s friend thinks I do.”

“Man, it’s cold. Gotta walk, move the blood.” She started down the sidewalk and Robby followed. “So your mom’s friend thinks you’ve got the knack. That’s great, Robby. But who the hell’s your mom’s friend?”

“Thomas Gifford.”

“My ASAC?” Vail asked, referring to the Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge of the profiling unit.

“Yeah.”

Vail stopped walking and turned to face Robby. “You never told me that.”

“Never came up. I wasn’t that close with my mom till she got sick, when I moved back here to take care of her. Gifford came around from time to time to see if she needed anything. I got the feeling they might’ve had a thing once. Anyway, after she died, suddenly the guy’s in my life, trying to help me out with all sorts of stuff. Probably made my mom a promise.”

“So you want to be a profiler. Well, you’ve got a good ‘in,’ which will definitely help.”

“I don’t want my mother’s friend pulling strings to get me a job, Karen. I want it legit.” Robby glanced up at the high sky as rain-drops began to dot the pavement. “Come on, we should get back.”

They turned and headed toward Melanie Hoffman’s house.

“Wanting to earn it on your own is fine, but don’t ever overlook inside contacts. Sometimes merit means shit. Good people, better people, get passed over all the time.”

“Fine, so I’ll use one of my inside contacts. Teach me, be my tutor.”

Vail looked up at the man who was a foot taller than she. “It’s not that easy. I mean, yeah, I could teach you stuff. But unless you have a good footing in psychology—”

“I was a psych minor at Cal State Northridge.”

Vail hesitated. “Well, that’s a start, I guess.” She continued on another few steps as she considered his request. “I guess there’s no harm. Just keep it from Hancock. Think of him as your enemy and you’ll be fine.”

“Hancock—that the GQ dude in there?”

“His history is short and sweet. Used to be with the Bureau, got passed over for the one vacant profiling position—which went to me—got pissed off, and left. He now heads up Senator Linwood’s security detail.”

“So he’s got a chip on his shoulder.”

“Not just a chip, the whole rock.”

They shared a laugh.

“Okay. Lesson one. You ready for this?”

“Hey, I’m a dry sponge.”

“Somehow that image doesn’t work for me, Robby.” They arrived at the house and stood by the front door, under the eave. “We were all in Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom looking over the crime scene. But we were seeing different things. You, Bledsoe, Manette, and Sinclair were following the criminalists’ lead, hoping to find a fingerprint, an errant hair fiber, a milligram of saliva. Something that’ll identify the monster who did this. I was looking at the offender’s behavior.” She paused a second and noted Robby’s furrowed brow. “A profiler isn’t concerned with fingerprints and DNA. We look at the behaviors the offender leaves behind at the scene. They’re crucial to helping us understand him, so we can figure out the type of person who did it.”

“What do you mean by ‘behaviors’?”

“Think of it this way. A sixteen year old who keeps a diary doesn’t lie to herself in her diary, right?”

“There’s no reason to. She’s writing to herself.”

“Exactly. So when you look at an offender, it’s best to look at his diary, which is the crime scene. He doesn’t lie to himself when he commits the crime. These behaviors, these things the offender has done after he’s killed his victim, are all over the crime scene, and they tell us a lot about him.”

“Like stabbing the eyes.”

“Right. Stabbing the eyes doesn’t prevent him from getting caught, and he doesn’t do it to disable the victim—she’s already dead.”

“So then why does he do it?”

“That’s the key question, Robby. Most of these offenders begin these behaviors when they’re young. For Dead Eyes, stabbing the eyes is part of a fantasy that kept evolving, developing over time. What we find repulsive is normal, even comforting to him. We find out why he finds it comforting, and we’re a step closer to understanding who this guy is. Understand who he is, and we can narrow the suspect pool. See, we don’t catch the bad guys, we give you dicks the information that helps you look at your suspects and say, this one fits, this one doesn’t.” She shivered. “Let’s go in, I’m freezing.”

“So why would a guy stab a woman in the eyes?”

“First of all, you can’t consider all the possibilities of why he did something. It’ll take you in a million different directions and you’ll never be able to focus. Only look at what’s most probable. So for the eyes, think symbolism,” she said as they walked through the hallway. “Maybe he didn’t want her to see what he was doing. Or maybe he’d met her somewhere and made a pass. She rejected him, and this was his way of making her pay for not seeing his true value. Or piercing the eyes may be sexual in nature. Maybe he’s incapable of having an erection.”

“I’d say it was probably rejection.”

“You can’t say it was anything. Not yet, anyway. A profiler has to come into the crime scene with her eyes wide open. No preconceived notions, no trying to attach labels to things. Consider the scene one fact at a time.” They stood at the doorway to the bedroom. “I’ve got some binders back in my office I can give you to read. Notes and research articles. They’ll give you an overview of all this stuff.”

“Cool.”

Vail nodded. “Okay, let’s go in again. And remember, you’re not looking at forensics. Keep an open mind and take what’s there, what the offender has given you. No biases.”

“Okay.”

Vail walked in and saw the other task force members standing at the foot of Melanie’s bed, staring at the wall.

“Those dot painters,” Hancock said.

“What?” Bledsoe asked.

“Those painters from like, a hundred years ago. They had a weird way of painting. See the wall, the paint strokes?”

Vail moved beside Bledsoe to get Hancock’s perspective. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s blood, not paint.”

“You of all people should appreciate this, Vail.” Hancock looked at her. “These walls are filled with psycho stuff. Rorschachs all over the place.”

“Your mind’s as twisted as the offender’s.”

“Hang on,” Manette said, holding up a hand. She gestured to Hancock. “Tell us what you’re thinking.”

“The painters who used dots to paint their pictures,” he said. “That’s what this looks like.”

Vail studied the blood patterns on the wall. “Pointillism or Impressionism?” she finally asked. “Pointillism involved dot painting. If I had to fit this into a category, I’d say this looks more like Impressionism to me.”

Bledsoe eyed her curiously.

“Art history/psych double major,” she explained.

Hancock tilted his chin ever so slightly toward the ceiling, as if looking down at Vail through reading glasses. “So, Miss Art History Major, still think my mind’s twisted?”

“I do,” Vail said, “but it’s got nothing to do with this case.”

“Let’s get some shots,” Bledsoe said to the forensic technician. “Wide angles, close-ups of all the walls.” He turned to Vail and said, under his breath, “Just in case. I think the guy’s onto something.”

Vail frowned, but she knew Bledsoe—and Hancock—were right. The blood murals were worth reviewing. In rejecting Hancock’s observation due to her prior history with him, she had broken the cardinal rule on which she had just counseled Robby: go in with an open mind and don’t bring any personal biases to the scene. She would discuss it with Robby later, if he didn’t bring it up himself.

Sinclair was standing at the edge of the bedroom with his forearms folded across his chest. “Anybody find the left hand?”

Everyone glanced around. Blank faces stared at each other. Bledsoe turned to the head forensic technician. “Chuck, you guys locate the severed hand?”

Chuck scanned the clipboarded list of identified and photographed items. “No left hand.”

Vail thought she knew why the hand was missing, but for the moment decided to keep her theory to herself until she could be more certain. “Let us know if there are any other . . . anatomical parts missing,” she said to Chuck.

“Why’d he bother to cut her hair?” Robby asked.

Vail nodded at the victim’s right hand. “Goes with the fingernails. For some reason, he’s trying to make her ugly. Butcher the hair, cut the nails down so short they bleed. It holds some meaning to him. Nothing can be overlooked.”

VAIL REMAINED ANOTHER FIFTEEN MINUTES, then left the forensic crew and task force to finish their work and headed to her office to gather materials for a class she was teaching at the Academy. While on the interstate, she pulled out her PDA and dictated her impressions on the Melanie Hoffman crime scene. She arrived earlier than expected, so she decided to grab a coffee at Gargoyle’s, the café across the road from the BAU, or Behavioral Analysis Unit, housed in the Aquia Commerce Center.

The downtime would allow her to collect her thoughts and transition between the crime scene and her office. She needed to become a person again, even if for only half an hour, before plunging back into the underworld of serial killers. Over the years, she’d found she needed that time, or risk losing herself in the dark abyss of the offenders’ twisted minds. If she entered that world, it would be harder to separate herself from the killer, harder to maintain her touch with reality.

If Thomas Gifford, her boss, ever found out she needed this “downtime,” he’d probably transfer her to a resident agency in a quiet town in the middle of nowhere. Because a profiler sees so much violent death—the worst offenses humanity has to offer—the Bureau has to be careful who it exposes to these atrocities on a daily basis. Gifford, the man who owned the desk where the profiling buck stopped, maintained a hawk-like vigilance over the people in his command. If there was a hint someone in the unit was not handling it well, he was gone. No questions asked and no chances for reinstatement. A suicide in the profiling unit would be a slight . . . kink in the old FBI shield of public opinion. Profilers had been known to tip the glass a bit too much, and suffer from heart disease and other stress-induced maladies, but none had committed suicide. Yet.

The commerce center was a grouping of modern two-story brick buildings in Aquia, Virginia, fifteen minutes south of the FBI Academy. The BAU, colloquially the “Profiling Unit,” having undergone myriad name changes and reorganizations over the years, underwent its most sweeping transformation of all when it moved out of the Academy’s subbasement. The brain trust realized that sitting sixty feet underground in an old bunker while analyzing grotesque photos of mutilated women was too much to ask the human mind to endure.

Divorcing itself from a shared existence with the BSU, or Behavioral Science Unit, its research and academic arm, the BAU moved down the road into the Aquia Commerce Center buildings. The new buildings’ large windows provided the antitoxin to death’s depressing cloak of subbasement bleakness: sunlight.

When Vail returned to her nine-by-nine office to retrieve her voice mail, she found a FedEx box on her desk with five pink “While you were out” messages sitting on her chair. She grabbed up the notes and sat down heavily. Her office had a cluttered feel to it, but though there were books and files and reports stacked atop every level surface, nothing was out of place. Two incandescent lights were clamped to opposite ends of her desk, reminder notes clipped to the rippled lampshades. Lining the metal bookshelves were black FBI binders with computer-printed titles peeking through the windowed spines: SEXUAL HOMICIDE, STALKING, BLOODSTAIN PATTERN INTERPRETATION, and SEXUAL SADISM. A handwritten sign taped to the shelf served as a warning: Do not “borrow” ANY of these binders.

Vail pressed a button on her phone and found three voice mails waiting for her. One was from the Office of Professional Responsibility about the shooting this morning at the bank. The second message was from her attorney, informing her the divorce was almost final. She closed her eyes and sighed relief.

Her euphoria lasted only until she heard the third message, which was from Jonathan, her fourteen year old, who was staying with his father this week. The message said he needed to talk. A teenager needing to talk is like a volcano erupting: it doesn’t happen often, and when it does, one never knows which way the lava is going to flow. Vail figured the topic of conversation was going to be his father, and she had spent the better part of the past eighteen months trying to get away from that man. Like it or not, her son was doing his best to unintentionally draw them back together.

She picked up the phone. At least it would buy her another five minutes of sanity before leaving for class. She’d had enough blood and guts today. She was in no hurry to wade through more.

five

He moved amongst his various creations, vases and large containers, fired hard and slick. All standing on pedestals of varying heights, lit by overhead spots that showcased them as the works of art that they were. The potter’s wheels and bisque kilns were in the rear of his studio, in another room and out of sight, visible only to his students. An artiste never left his tools of creation in plain view for the unindoctrinated to see. Only the finished products, the masterpieces, were worthy of display.

He stored the boxes of wet clay off to the side of his studio, behind a movable wall. Every month he loaded and unloaded a half ton of clay—literally a thousand pounds—from the distributor to his Audi’s trailer and from the trailer to his studio. At first, whenever he’d go buy the stuff, the damn boxes were so heavy he’d need a student to help carry them. But after a few months of hauling the cases to and from his car and kneading the stuff with his hands, he could maneuver them around the loft pretty easily without any help.

But the best part of being a ceramicist was the feel of the cold, wet, firm clay as he squeezed it between his fingers. It kind of felt like a liver, heavy and dense. Holding someone’s liver in your hands was a tremendous feeling of power.

He closed up the plastic bag so the clay would stay fresh, rinsed off his hands, and headed into the adjacent loft to change into his dark suit. After slipping on the jacket, he stepped into the old walk-in closet to pick out a tie and something—the musty smell? the darkness? the brush of clothing against his cheek? Something set off the old memories. It was dizzying, almost disorienting. He shut the door and sat down at his nearby desk, thoughts and emotions flooding into his mind. He just wanted it to stop, but realized it may be best to embrace it, confront it. Shape it.

He lifted the screen to his laptop and woke it from sleep. The words, the feelings, the memories just flowed out of him like some kind of rushing river that kept surging no matter what stood in its path.

The hiding place smells like some musty box I once opened when I was looking for his cigarettes. It’s strong and kind of burns my nose. It’s small and dark, but it’s mine. He doesn’t know I have it, which means he can’t find me here. And if he can’t find me, he can’t hurt me. I can think here, I can breathe here (well, except for the smell) without him yelling. I sit in the darkness, alone with myself, where no one can hurt me. Where HE can’t hurt me.

But I watch him. I watch everything he does through little holes in the walls. I watch him bring home the whores, I watch what he does to them before dragging them upstairs to his bedroom. Sometimes I even hear what they’re saying, but most of the time I just see. I see what he does.

But I really don’t have to see. I already know. I know because he does the same things to me.

He shook his head, as if trying to dislodge the childhood memories from his mind. He’d have to do more of this. It was very liberating, and very . . . stimulating. He glanced at the clock on his screen and realized he was late. He closed the laptop’s lid, grabbed the tie, and ran down the steps to his car. He was at the evil bitch’s house pretty fast, but then again he was daydreaming about what he’d written and wasn’t paying attention to the time.

He’d only been here once, a drive-by to see if the site was a suitable location for his work. An artist must survey his setting to make sure it can inspire him, bring the creative juices to boil at just the right moment. Timing was so crucial. But for this type of art, the creative part came only after the evil was purged. Only then could the brilliance be fully expressed.

He parked a block away, down a side street, and huffed it toward the house. In suit and tie, he wouldn’t attract attention walking around the neighborhood. And if anyone did question him, he’d pull out his FBI shield and they’d slink away, properly silenced.

He approached the side yard, looking for signs of a security system: magnetic trips on the window sill, wire tape, or even the obnoxious “Protected by” placard stuck in the dirt by the front door. As if a stupid alarm is really going to protect them from someone who wanted to do something evil. Evil—they don’t know what evil is!

He stood by the back door and knocked lightly. Listened for a barking dog. Nothing. Very good. He did another walk-around of the perimeter, then stopped at the front door, which was shielded from the street by a dense shrub that stretched ten feet high toward the eave. He gave one last knock and a ring of the doorbell, then decided no one was home. He slipped on latex gloves, removed a lock-pick kit from his pocket, chose the proper tools.

A couple minutes later, he was standing in the hallway, taking in the décor. Not bad, but not as elaborate as the last bitch’s place. Couple of fabric sofas with a horrid floral print, an old GE television in the corner in a melamine entertainment cabinet, and an area rug on the wood floor. House must’ve been about thirty, forty years old. Bad taste was a lot older than that.

He made his way into the master bedroom and looked around, in the dresser and night table drawers. No condoms, no thick, heavy watches, no Sports Illustrated magazines. No aftershave or musky cologne. Only women’s clothing in the closet. Bottom line: no boyfriend or male figure to worry about.

On the way out of the room, he pressed on the mattress. New and firm, perfect for his work. An artist required the proper media, or the result would be unacceptable. But first things first. Purge the evil.

He moved into the kitchen and checked the drawers: four steak knives. He removed one and examined it. Sufficiently sharp. It would do nicely. He replaced it and turned his attention to the refrigerator . . . always a valuable resource. It told so much about people. Not just what’s inside, but what’s outside. Mounted with magnets were a series of snapshots, all showing the bitch of the house in various poses: standing with a set of snow skis in the winter, barreling through a plume of water on jet skis in the summer, and flexing with her personal trainer at a health club.

Off the main hallway that stretched the length of the house sat another two bedrooms. No furniture in one, an old twin bed and matching oak dresser that were angling for the distressed look in the other. No personal effects. In sum, no roommate.

As he headed back toward the front door, he saw an unopened bill on the credenza. Addressed to Sandra Ann Franks. The bitch’s name. He was sure he already knew more about her than her gynecologist. Sandra Ann Franks. Well, it wouldn’t be Franks for long. “I’ll have to be frank with you, Miss Franks. No, no, let me be blunt as I drive this knife through your eyes!”

Sometimes you get so focused you forget to see the humor in the situation.

But evil was no laughing matter. This was serious business. And Sandra Ann Franks had passed the final test. Like moist clay right out of the box, she was ready to be molded and shaped. And cut into pieces.

He glanced at his stopwatch: he’d been in the house nearly four minutes . . . time to go. He clicked the door shut behind him, made sure it was locked. He didn’t want anything happening to the bitch before he returned.

six

Karen Vail stood in the back of an Academy classroom waiting her turn to speak. For each new agent class, she taught an overview of behavioral analysis so the recruits didn’t end up like those cops who thought she could hold a piece of the victim’s clothing and describe the face of the killer.

“So without further ado, I’d like to have Special Agent Vail come to the podium.”

All heads swiveled in Vail’s direction, but there was no clapping. Usually, the instructor gave her such a buildup that the new agents felt compelled to stand and bow as if she were some demigod. Or at least welcome her with a warm round of applause. But this instructor was new, and he didn’t seem to go into her background as much as the others had. At least, she didn’t think he did. Her mind was on Melanie Hoffman, and she wasn’t really listening.

She made her way to the front, opened her laptop, and gazed at the inclined classroom—at the eager faces staring at her. She remembered that look, that feeling of excitement at beginning something new. She still loved her work—in an odd sort of way given what she did—and still felt challenged. But it was no longer fresh, and like the exhilaration one feels at the start of a budding romantic relationship, the magic had faded with time. The challenge, instead of only coming from the job, morphed into a struggle to keep it interesting.

“I’m Karen Vail,” she started. “I know, you were probably expecting a man. I can see it in your faces.” She liked to start by putting them on the defensive. Part of the new agent initiation protocol. Either that or she’d done too many interrogations—after a while, you started looking for the upper hand in all conversations.

“Profiling isn’t an exact science, no matter what anyone tells you. Now I can just assign you one of Douglas’s books to read, then come back in a couple of days to answer questions, but that’s not my style. I’m here to give you a perspective on the sick minds we’re tracking out there. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. The violence they perpetrate on others is sick, for sure, but they’re not mentally ill—they know damn well what they’re doing. We’ll talk more about this later.”

After spending a few moments outlining the organizational chart for her unit, she sensed it was time to pick up the pace. A couple of the agents in the back row were slumped over, heads resting in their hands, no doubt thinking about lunch in the dining hall.

“Let’s go into some actual examples to give you an idea of how we look at things.” She lifted the lid of her laptop, then pressed a button on the lectern’s AV panel. The classroom lights dimmed and the rear projection screen behind her glowed with yellow and white text against a black background. “Critical Incident Response Group, Behavioral Profiling Analysis” was boldly emblazoned across the screen. She pressed the Bluetooth remote and advanced to the next PowerPoint slide. In public school, when Vail was growing up, they used real slides. They jammed, they faded if you left them under the projection light too long, and you didn’t have near the creativity of the graphics she was able to produce for her FBI presentations on PowerPoint. Now her slides zipped across the screen with fancy corner-to-corner wipes, dissolves, and all sorts of neat effects. Her students still fell asleep on her. So much for technology.

“This is the case I’m currently working on,” Vail said. “The Dead Eyes killer.” She heard a few snickers. “This isn’t a laughing matter,” she barked at them. The room got very quiet very quickly. “What you’re about to see is disgusting, the product of a monster. I hope none of you have to come upon a crime scene like this one. But my goal is that if you do, you’ll at least know something about what you’re looking at. And how to go about helping catch the bastard.”

She hit the button on the remote and the first slide dissolved on the screen. A woman’s bedroom beamed from the computer. Her brutalized torso lay on the bed in front of a mirror, the now-familiar sight of steak knives protruding from both eye orbits. “This was the first victim. Marci Evers. Twenty-eight, brunet. Worked as a paralegal in Vienna.” She pressed another button and a second slide wiped across the screen beside the one displaying the crime scene. “Here you see the statistics and facts we know about the victim. I’m going to direct you to one thing, to illustrate a point. How many of you know what MO stands for?” This was basic “Cop 101” stuff, and she knew all their hands would be raised. But she was planning to throw them a curveball, to see who could hit it.

There were forty-some-odd new agents ready to answer. Vail looked at one of the women and nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Modus operandi,” she said.

“Or method of operation, in English. Yes. Now a tougher question. Does MO ever change?”

This time there were no hands raised. They were thinking, which was good. Vail waited a moment, then gave them the answer. “Research indicates that the MO of sex offenders changes every three to four months. Why?”

Again, no hands were raised. “Okay, let’s take a look as to why it would change.”

She pulled a laser pointer from her jacket pocket and pointed it at the screen. “Everyone see this blood on Marci Evers’s cranium?” The area had been shaved and a small skin laceration was evident at the crown of her head. “Why would there be such an injury?”

“He hit her to knock her out,” a new agent said.

Vail nodded. “Good answer. You might be right.” She turned back to the screen. “Now let’s look at Dead Eyes’s second victim.” She pressed the remote and another set of slides materialized. “Noreen Galvan O’Regan. Twenty-six, brunet, licensed nurse practitioner. Worked in Fredericksburg, lived in Maryes Heights.” She pointed at the cranium. “What do we see here?” The laser was pointed at a shaved portion of Noreen’s scalp.

“Another blow to the head,” a woman in the back row remarked.

“Indeed. But this one’s larger, wouldn’t you say? The injury is more extensive. This is Dead Eyes’s MO, ladies and gentlemen. A blow to the head. But we’re still not sure why the killer did this to his victims, and we can’t explain why Noreen’s is worse than Marci’s. Let’s look further.” She changed the slide. “What’s this—anybody?” It was a close-up of Marci’s right hand, showing two broken fingernails, cuts, and bruises on the hand and forearm.

“Defensive wounds?” asked someone in the first row.

“Exactly. Defensive wounds. Let’s back up a second and take a look at Noreen’s hands.” She hit the next slide. “No broken nails. A large bruise on the right forearm. So why are there so few defensive wounds on Noreen?”

Vail clicked a few times with the mouse and located a folder containing digital pictures. After opening one of the photos, she could tell from their faces that some of them were getting it.

“This is Melanie Hoffman, his latest victim. I was at her crime scene this morning.” She clicked the mouse again and additional views of Melanie’s crime scene appeared. Vail glanced at each one, then asked the class, “What do you see?”

“The back of her head is totally caved in,” an agent said. “And there aren’t any defensive wounds.”

“Now, can we reach a conclusion as to why the offender inflicted these blows on his victims?”

“To immobilize them.” The voice came from a corner in the back of the room. It was Thomas Gifford, the Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge of Special Investigations—Vail’s boss. She had not seen him come in, but that was Gifford’s way. Stealth.

“That’s exactly right,” Vail said, playing along, unsure why Gifford was sitting in on her class. His office was in the same building as hers was, fifteen minutes down the road. “The offender used the blows to immobilize his victims. The head injuries were progressively more substantial as we go from victim one to victim three because he learned from his encounter with Marci Evers. She fought back. We saw all those defensive wounds. The next time around, he was more prepared. He took out Noreen O’Regan more efficiently, with a more damaging blow to her cranium—and he succeeded. No broken nails, just a bruise on the forearm. She didn’t put up much of a fight. And now, when he gets to his next victim, Melanie Hoffman, we don’t see any defensive wounds. He learned from his two prior encounters and refined his methods. He improved his MO.”

“So MO can change,” ASAC Gifford said.

He was trying to help her. Vail didn’t need—or want—his assistance. “That’s right. Give Agent Gifford a gold star.” The smile disappeared from his face. “MO can change, so that’s why we don’t usually rely on it to give us linkage. Linkage allows us to connect one victim to another, which gives us valuable information about the offender. So if we can’t use MO to establish linkage, we have to use another convention, called ritual. Anyone want to venture what ritual is? Anyone other than my boss,” she said, forcing a smile.

There were no takers. “Ritual,” Vail said, “is psychosexual need-based behavior. It’s behavior that’s unnecessary to the successful commission of a crime. It can be cutting the victim’s hair, removing her organs—things that have nothing do with killing the victim or preventing us from catching him. These kinds of behavior speak to an inner need the killer’s not even aware of.” She stopped, glanced at Gifford, then looked away. “So we know MO changes. What about ritual?”

No hands raised.

“Ritual behavior does not change, primarily because, unlike MO, he’s not even conscious of why he’s doing it. Now,” Vail said, raising an index finger for emphasis, “signature is another term we need to discuss. It’s the unique combination of ritual behaviors seen at two or more crime scenes. This is important because we can get a signature within MO and ritual, which is an exciting new paradigm—”

“Agent Vail.”

It was Gifford, and his face, in the gray and red hue thrown off from the projected photos, looked hard. Angry.

“Yes, Agent Gifford.” She tried to treat him like one of the class but knew that wouldn’t last long.

“Signature is signature. MO is MO. The two do not mix.”

Gifford had been a profiler for a couple of years but through some inner political maneuverings, a death, and some unexpected—and untimely—retirements, he moved up the chain of command very rapidly. His brief stint with the profiling unit made him an annoyance. He knew just enough to make skilled profilers’ lives miserable, but not enough to really know what he was doing. Most ASACs in the history of the unit were pure administrators and had no on-the-job training. Vail figured it had been done that way for a reason.

Vail did not like being corrected in front of a class of new agents. She swallowed hard, then forced a smile. “Well, I can see why you think I’m wrong. However, after an offender perfects his MO, and there’s no need to change it, we start to see the offender engaging in well-defined MO behaviors—behaviors that won’t change because he doesn’t need to change them. These behaviors become a signature within the MO.”

“Agent Vail,” Gifford said, standing and moving to the front of the small auditorium. “I think you’re done here today. Why don’t you wait for me in the library.”

She watched him approach, shocked he would treat her like this, in this setting. She must have stood there a little too long, as he leaned into her face.

“The library, Agent Vail.”

“Yes, sir.” She laid the remote on the lectern, put her head down, and walked out, avoiding the gaze of all the embarrassed agents. But she knew they were more than likely shocked; she was the one who was embarrassed.

And furious.

VAIL SAT WAITING for Gifford for twenty minutes. The library was neat and orderly, quiet and grand, with floor-to-ceiling brown brick walls and wood panel insets, black granite countertops and a three-story central atrium. Against a wall stood a silent grandfather clock that, Vail noticed, was running fifteen minutes slow.

Gifford walked in with a scowl on his large face and sat down hard at the table to her right. He pulled out his PDA and began making notes with the stylus, completely ignoring Vail’s presence. But she knew what was going on. With her background in psychology, it was quite clear. He was maneuvering for control, establishing who was in charge. He was telling her that he would talk to her when he was ready—and that she would have to come to him.

Vail decided to play a little control game of her own. She opened a book she had brought with her to class, which happened to be the bible of investigators worldwide—a reference text on violent crimes written by the founding FBI profilers. She had been through the Crime Classification Manual several times in the past and wasn’t really reading it now. However, showing Gifford that she was not put off by his behavior neutralized the power he was trying to assert over her.

Vail thumbed through the pages. Gifford pecked away with his stylus. She wondered how long he was planning to keep up the charade. She knew he was reaching when he began poking at the tiny on-screen keyboard, one letter at a time. There was just so much patience someone could have with that.

“Turn to page two sixty-one.”

Vail looked up, unsure if he was talking to her. “Sir?”

“Page two sixty-one. Bottom of the page, I believe.”

Gifford was referring to the section on MO and signature. She closed the text and turned to face him. He was looking at her, his expression telling her he thought he had made his point. “Sir, this was written over twenty-five years ago. It was groundbreaking back then, but it’s outdated. Or at least incomplete.”

“Karen Vail, crack profiler for six years, says that the preeminent research on the topic is outdated. Well let me tell you something, Agent Vail. Human behavior doesn’t change—”

“But the way we look at it and classify it does.”

“Let’s get one thing straight. If you want to write a research paper filled with your personal theories, go ahead. Get it published if you can. Hell, when you retire you can follow in the paths of John Douglas and Thomas Underwood and write several goddamn books on the topic. But until your theory is generally accepted procedure, you stick with what is. I want you out there expounding these principles. Outdated as you may think they are.”

“Sir—”

“I think I’ve made myself clear. Now, whether you’re teaching new agents or out in the field giving lectures to the law enforcement community, the message has to be consistent. And right now, that means quoting chapter and verse from that manual you hold in your hands.”

“Sir, in the beginning all of this was theory. The principles you speak about arose from a group of agents’ understanding of criminology and their personal beliefs.”

“Wrong. Their principles arose from thousands of hours of interviews with prisoners and years of painstaking research into the minds of these killers. Their principles have helped lead to the arrest and conviction of hundreds of violent offenders over the years.”

“I’m well aware of that. And I have tremendous respect for them and their work—”

“But you think you’ve come up with something they didn’t think of.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Fine. Keep it to yourself. When you’ve done exhaustive research and can prove your theories, I’ll be willing to listen to what you have to say. Until then, you’re mute on the subject.”

He rose from his chair and headed out of the library, leaving Vail at the adjacent table, chewing on her lip.

seven

Following her acrimonious meeting with Gifford, Vail headed down I-95 to Jonathan’s middle school. The sky was still overcast and the air was heavy with the smell of precipitation. As she approached the school grounds, she saw Jonathan walking along the sidewalk with an auburn-haired girl who had a shapelier figure than Vail remembered having had herself at fourteen.

Vail pulled over to the curb and rolled down the window. “Hey handsome,” she said to her son, “want a ride?”

Jonathan smiled and some color filled his cheeks. Obviously, this girl meant something to him. “Mom, this is Becca.”

Vail nodded. “Nice to meet you.” She knew Jonathan wanted to talk, and she’d promised to meet with him around 4:30, but was now a good time, when he was with his latest heartthrob? “Becca, can I give you a ride home?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I only live across the street.” Becca turned to Jonathan and took his hand, then whispered something in his ear. Vail turned away, attempting to respect her son’s privacy . . . even though she really wished Jonathan was wearing a wire.

Jonathan got in the car and fastened his seat belt as Vail pulled away.

“She’s cute.”

“I guess.”

Vail glanced over at Jonathan. “So how was school?”

“Fine.”

The one- and two-word answers drove Vail crazy much of the time, but she knew it was all part of being a teenager.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Look, I took time off work. If there’s something bothering you, I think we should talk. Don’t you?”

Jonathan was still staring out the window as they passed a Baskin-Robbins. “How about some ice cream?” he asked.

“It’s winter. Are you serious?”

“Serious.”

The smell of French vanilla hit her as she walked through the door. “See? It’s empty because no one eats ice cream in the winter when it’s twenty-five degrees outside.”

“I do.” He walked up to the counter and ordered a chocolate shake, then joined his mother at a small table across the room. It was warm inside, practically humid, and the storefront windows were fogged almost the entire way up to the ceiling. Vail pulled off her gloves and undid her scarf. Jonathan sat there, hunkered down with his coat zipped to his chin.

“When you call me and tell me you need to talk, it’s usually for one of two things. Money is the second. Your father is the first.”

Her son nodded but did not say anything.

“You know I’m an FBI agent, not a dentist, right? I’m not good at pulling teeth.” She smiled, but his face remained a mask. “Okay, so this is serious. Your father, right? You’re angry with him.”

“Well, duh. How’d you guess?”

Vail resisted the urge to admonish him for his fresh mouth. “So what’d he do that made you so angry?”

Jonathan’s jaw tightened, and he looked away.

Vail decided it was best to wait him out. She could tell he wanted to talk; it was a matter of him gathering the courage to open up.

The whir of the milkshake machine filled the small store. A moment later, when Jonathan turned back to her, his nostrils were flaring. “He never listens to me. He never talks to me unless he wants me to do something for him. Then he yells at me if I don’t do things just the way he wants them done. Calls me a retard. A stupid retard, that he’s—” Jonathan stopped and looked away again.

Vail detected a slight quiver in his lower lip. There was a glassy look to his eyes, too. “That he’s what, Jonathan?”

“That he’s embarrassed to have an idiot for a son.”

Vail felt the anger well up inside her. It was the same bullshit Deacon had pulled with her, in the last year of their marriage. The verbal abuse. The need to feel powerful by berating others. “That must’ve hurt.”

Jonathan’s gaze was down in his lap somewhere, as if trying to hide his emotions.

The milkshake machine stopped its whine, replaced by the taps and clinks of glass and metal scoops.

Vail scooted her chair over slightly and placed a hand on Jonathan’s. “I know what it’s like. Your father is . . . insensitive.” An asshole is what she wanted to say. Deacon wasn’t always like that—though he was never the empathetic type, he was always good to her, and he was there for her when she needed him—until his career fell apart, until he became bitter and jealous. The slide into anger and resentment came soon after, a deepening abyss from which he never escaped.

Vail eyed Jonathan and felt sorry she couldn’t have spared him the pain of a breakup, of having to leave him half-time with a bitter, downtrodden father. “But honey,” she said, “you know what he said isn’t true, right? You’re a talented, loving, bright young man. I’m very proud to have you as my son.”

Jonathan looked up and found his mother’s soft, hazel eyes. Then his face flushed and he began sobbing. She leaned closer and took her son by the back of the neck and brought him against her shoulder and held him there, letting him cry. She flashed on the memory of her six-year-old boy who’d fallen off his bicycle . . . his friends laughing at him and Jonathan bursting into tears, more out of embarrassment than from injury. She stroked his hair now as she’d done then and waited until he calmed himself.

The counter clerk put the shake on top of the ice cream case and nodded at Vail. She looked down at Jonathan, who pulled away, sniffling and swiping at his nose with the back of a hand. She grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and gave it to him.

“He gets drunk just about every night. He pushes me, grabs my shirt collar, and gets in my face.” He paused. “I don’t want to go back there, Mom. I don’t care if I never see him again.”

Vail completely understood his feelings, but at the same time, it disheartened her to think that her son couldn’t stand to be with his father. “He’s got joint custody. It’s not up to you, or even me.”

“You’ve got to do something, Mom. I’m not going back there.”

“I’ll call my attorney. You may have to talk to him, probably even someone from the court, too. The judge won’t listen to me. He needs to hear it from you.”

“Fine. Whatever.”

“In the meantime, you’re going to have to stay at your father’s. When he says those things to you, just ignore him. Hum a song in your head, or just think of me, telling you how terrific you are. I know it’s hard. I lived through it myself.”

“Yeah, but one day you decided you were leaving, and that was that.”

“It wasn’t that simple, Jonathan.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re gone and I’m still there.”

His words were like arrows to her heart. It wasn’t that simple . . . but Jonathan was right: he was stuck there and she had escaped. They sat silently for a moment, memories rushing through her mind like a bullet train. A tear rolled down her cheek, lost its hold, then dropped to her lap.

Jonathan sat there, staring at the window, and did not say a thing. Vail dabbed at her eyes with a napkin, then took the shake from the counter, and placed it in front of her son. He didn’t move. Vail followed his gaze to a small droplet of water winding its way down the fogged window, leaving behind a trail of clear glass as it moved lower. She wondered if Jonathan was somehow relating to the path of the lone drop moving through a wall of murky fog. Then the image of Melanie Hoffman’s blood murals popped into her mind.

She shook her head and forced her thoughts back to Jonathan. But as so often was the case, her work had intruded on her personal space.

“Go ahead and drink your shake,” Vail said. She pulled out her phone. “I’ll call my attorney, see about getting you out of that house as soon as possible.” She punched the keys with a vicious anger. “Whatever it takes, Jonathan, I promise I’ll get you out of there.”

eight

After dropping Jonathan at Deacon’s house, Vail put in another call to her family law attorney and spent a nervous evening plotting out her strategy . . . making lists and organizing her thoughts to help the lawyer build a solid argument for revisiting the custody arrangement.

But with the dawning of the new morning, she had to push Jonathan’s problems aside and force her attention back to her job. Robby was waiting for her to pick him up en route to an interview with Melanie Hoffman’s parents. The Hoffmans lived in an older clapboard house on acreage buried in a wooded area of Bethesda. Built eighty or ninety years ago, by Vail’s estimation, it was well maintained and sported a collection of flowerpots and wreaths arranged on the front porch.

She and Robby stood at the door and waited for the Hoffmans to answer the knock. A detective had already delivered the news about their daughter’s death, so they were at least spared the task of having to tell parents their little girl had not only passed on, but that her death was a horrific one, one you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies.

Footsteps clapped along behind the front door. Wood flooring, Vail figured, heavy steps. Mr. Hoffman, no doubt.

“Sounds like we got the man of the house,” Robby muttered to Vail.

The door swung open and revealed a man of around fifty, about thirty extra pounds piled on his midsection. Clear blue eyes, glazed over, with a head of receding dark brown hair. Delicate features. Melanie’s father, for sure.

“Roberto Hernandez, Vienna PD. We spoke on the phone.” Robby waited a beat, received a slight flicker in the man’s eyes as acknowledgment, then continued: “This is my partner, Karen Vail, with the FBI.”

The man nodded. “Howard Hoffman. Wife’s in the living room.” He held the door open for them, and they entered the modest home. Wood plank floors, as Vail surmised. What she hadn’t anticipated were the paintings hanging everywhere there was wall space. Paintings similar in style to those they had seen in Melanie’s house.

“Melanie was very talented,” Vail noted as they followed Howard into the living room.

“My wife,” he said, motioning with a hand. “Cynthia.”

“Ma’am,” Robby said, nodding at her. He and Vail stood there awkwardly, awaiting a response from the woman. But she simply stared ahead at the window at the far end of the room.

“Can I get you anything?” Howard asked.

“Just some answers,” Vail said, attempting a slight smile.

Howard sat on the couch beside Cynthia and motioned his guests to the opposing love seat.

“We’re sorry for your loss,” Robby said. “I can’t imagine—”

“She was a very special girl.”

The voice came from Cynthia, but it was so soft Vail wondered whether she had actually heard something. But Robby had heard it too, because he stopped in midsentence. They both looked at the woman. She was Howard’s age, but her posture and grief made her appear older. Shoulders rolled forward, hands curled around a tissue in her lap, eyes bloodshot, and wavy chestnut hair falling loosely around the sides of a haggard face.

Vail waited for elaboration, but Cynthia did not offer anything. Her gaze did not move.

“Mr. Hoffman,” Robby said softly, “we know Melanie had just started working for McGinty & Pollock. Where did she work before that?”

“A big firm in DC, I don’t remember the name. Began with a ‘P.’”

“Price Finnerton.” From Cynthia. They looked at her, and Vail made note of the name on her pad.

“Did she have any problems there? Did anyone give her a hard time, any conflicts with her boss?”

“Nothing.”

Vail and Robby waited for elaboration from Cynthia, but there was no reaction.

“Do you know why she left? Was she unhappy there?”

“She loved working there,” Howard said. “I told her she was worth more than they were paying her. I kept nagging her about it, and to put me off she called some company, I think they call them headhunters. Three weeks later, she got a job offer from McGinty for twenty thousand more than Price Finnerton was paying her.” He paused, his head bowing down. “Maybe if she’d stayed put this wouldn’t have happened. . . .”

Vail inched forward on the couch. “Mr. Hoffman, we’re searching for details right now as to why this happened, but I can assure you it’s got nothing to do with what you told Melanie. The man who did this has killed other women and he’ll kill again. It has nothing to do with you or the advice you gave your daughter.” Vail had no guarantee what she was telling Howard was true, but she hated seeing the victim’s family beat themselves up with guilt over things they had said or hadn’t said, done or hadn’t done.

Howard nodded but kept his head down. Robby offered him a tissue, and he took it, wiped at his eyes.

“Mr. Hoffman, are you aware of anyone, family members included, who might’ve had a disagreement with Melanie?”

“No.”

“What about friends? Did she have many?”

Howard tilted his head up, made eye contact. “A few close ones. They were all good people. Most were single, one was divorced, like Melanie.”

Robby squinted. “Melanie was divorced?”

“Annulled,” Cynthia said. She turned to face Robby. “Her marriage was annulled. There’s a difference.” Her voice was stronger, but her eyes fluttered back down to her lap.

“This guy’s name?” Vail asked.

“You don’t think he—”

Robby held up a hand. “We turn over a lot of rocks during the course of an investigation. Just to see what crawls out.”

“Neil Kroes. We’ve got a number somewhere. Cynthia, hun, can you get it?” Without a word, Cynthia rose and walked out of the room.

“We’ll need a list of her friends, too,” Vail said. She tore a piece of paper from her notepad and handed it to Howard with a pen. While he wrote down their names, Vail continued: “Do you know if she frequented any bars or nightclubs?”

“That wasn’t Melanie. She didn’t drink, didn’t like the nightlife. And she didn’t use drugs, either, if that was going to be your next question.”

Vail sensed some anger, as if it would be an insult if she had asked. The murals flashed in her mind, along with Hancock’s comment. “What about her artwork? Did she have classes, formal training of any sort?”

“She took classes in college, then studied privately with a family friend in Alexandria.”

“The friend’s name?”

Howard’s eyes narrowed. “She’s seventy-nine years old, Agent Vail. I doubt she murdered my daughter.”

Vail was about to tell him that often an innocent person can provide information that leads to another individual, who leads to someone else that turns out to be the killer. But Robby told him before she could open her mouth.

“Cyn, honey,” Howard called into the kitchen, “we need Martha’s number, too.”

They continued to ask Howard questions about his daughter’s habits, family background, dating habits, and the always delicate question, her sexual practices. Howard’s drawn face looked ashen when Vail asked the question. But he answered it succinctly: “She wasn’t promiscuous, and besides, she didn’t have much time for dating.”

Cynthia returned to the room, handed Robby a slip of paper, and took her place on the couch.

Vail felt they had reached their limits for this visit. If they needed more information, they could drop by again, or simply call—which might be easier on the Hoffmans.

Robby, apparently sensing what Vail was thinking, rose from the couch and extended a hand. Howard shook it but didn’t make eye contact.

“Thanks for your help,” Vail said. “We’ll let ourselves out.”

They made their way down the hall but were stopped in their tracks by Howard’s voice. “When you catch this monster, I want to see him. I want some time alone with him.”

Vail and Robby had no answer, other than to nod. They turned back to the door and left.

nine

Her eyes stare straight ahead in rapture as I pull the bindings tighter. She doesn’t cry out, which is odd, but the terror is in her face—the jaw muscles are vise-tight, the forehead crinkled with dread. She doesn’t deserve to live. Because it’s there, like I tell them, it’s there if you’d only look. Do you see it, Agent Vail? Just like Douglas said—study the art, you’ll know the artist. So study! What do you see?

I’ll tell you what you see. You see nothing. Because you can’t; you’re blinded by what it means. You watch, frozen and helpless as I bring the knife back and stab her right eye, a nauseating squish! as the blade penetrates the surface and goes deeper into the brain—

Vail sat up, chest heaving, her throat dryer than dust, her heart bruising itself against her ribcage. Holy shit. That was all she could think: Holy shit, that was intense.

She lay in bed another hour or so, trying to fall back asleep, all the while hoping she wouldn’t, fearing a return to the dream that just about took her breath away. By the time dawn began creeping around the edges of her window shades, she was finally tired enough to drift off. Her alarm clock blared an hour later, and had she not just bought the damn thing she would have thrown it through the window. But then she’d have a window to repair, and in the past year the divorce had caused enough self-inflicted hell in her life. She was enjoying the calm and hoped there wasn’t a storm lurking around the bend.

When Vail got to the office, she remembered she was first up on the card to present. Twenty-five years ago, the founders of the profiling unit chose Wednesday mornings for a free-thinking roundtable discussion of current cases the agents were working. The unit still met on Wednesday mornings, and the brainstorming sessions remained a useful tool that ensured the lead profiler had not overlooked something because he had gotten too close to his case. Sometimes having someone look over your shoulder enabled you to pull back from the needle to see the haystack.

The meetings were held in a large rectangular conference room, with the new budget-conscious Bureau crafting a fiscally intelligent setup. Instead of a long, traditional oval table that had but one purpose, the new look was six rectangular cherry wood tables neatly abutting each other, forming one large table around which sixteen people could sit. If needed, the tables could be separated into six-seaters for impromptu workshop sessions.

Tan wallpaper with textured vertical stripes added to the room’s utilitarian feel. An LCD projector and wall-mounted screen, overhead projector, large pivoting white board, and television/VCR/ DVD setup were silently placed off to the side in an alcove, like a coroner ready to pull back the sheet to expose the horrors of psychotic minds.

Seated around the segmented conference table were Vail’s profiling colleagues: senior members Art Rooney, Dietrich Hutchings, Tom van Owen, Frank Del Monaco, and nine other men who’d been with the unit fewer than five years.

Vail hadn’t had much time to prepare this morning’s presentation. She had been handed a CD with the remaining photos from Melanie Hoffman’s crime scene fifteen minutes ago, and she had rushed to view them on her laptop to throw them into some semblance of order. But she knew the case well, at least up to the point of the latest victim, and felt confident she could wing the rest of it.

Because she was the first and only woman in the profiling unit, looking good in front of her peers was important. She always felt she was held to different standards, higher levels of scrutiny. During her first few weeks in the new position, every time she was shown a crime scene photo of a dismembered body, a female so grotesquely beaten that she no longer had a face, the others in the unit expected her to grab for the garbage pail and puke her guts out. Not that they didn’t do that their first time around—they simply expected her to be weak because she was a woman. She was not superhuman—of course the pictures affected her—but she only wanted to be treated the same way they had treated each other.

But Vail felt that people learned who they were by placing themselves into situations and seeing how they reacted. While staring at grotesque photos of women who had been abused, she gained a tremendous amount of insight into herself. Insight that told her when it was time to leave her husband.

Vail stood at the head of the room with her expandable Dead Eyes case folder lying on the conference table in front of her. She opened the PowerPoint file and started the slide show mode.

She brushed back her hair, then took a sip of burnt coffee. It was time to start. “I’ve got an update on Dead Eyes,” she said in a normal speaking volume. The obligatory “shushes” followed. “He’s struck again, this time a young female CPA. Baseline crime scene pretty much the way he left it with vics one and two.” Vail punched the remote and the first slide appeared. Someone hit the light switch in the back of the room and everything darkened except for the faces of the agents, which were illuminated by the light bouncing off the screen.

It was a wide-angle view of Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom. Vail took a second to scan it, then said, “Stabbed through the eyes with ordinary steak knives taken from the vic’s apartment. Eviscerated stomach, kidneys, and liver. Left hand severed but not recovered by the techs. Small intestine tied around the victim’s thighs. Blood painted all over the walls.” She paused for a moment to let the information sink in. “Victim was a recent addition to a DC accounting firm. Nothing stood out in the interview with the parents. Couple of things to follow up on, but that’s it. The task force was reassembled, headed up by Paul Bledsoe, Fairfax County.”

One of the agents leaned forward. “I haven’t looked at this case in a while, but are we still thinking this guy’s disorganized?”

Vail looked at the man who had asked the question. Tom van Owen, a nine-year veteran of the unit. His cuticles were red and inflamed, the skin peeling from being incessantly picked. Even now, he sat reclining in the ergonomic chair, absently scraping at the calluses around the nail bed with his other hand.

“I don’t think so,” Vail said. She clicked past the next few slides until she reached the ones that showed the murals. “Even though there is an awful lot of blood, I’m not convinced it’s a sign of disorganization.” Vail thought of Chase Hancock’s “painter” comment. She clenched her jaw, irritated he may’ve been right.

“He used weapons of opportunity. Those knives,” Dietrich Hutchings said. He waved at the screen with his thick-framed reading glasses. “They’re the vic’s, you said.”

“I know that points to disorganization, but I’m thinking something else.” Typically, disorganized offenders did not bring weapons with them; they used common objects found in the victim’s own house. “Cause of death appears to be asphyxiation, just like the others. So the knives aren’t opportunistic weapons,” Vail explained. “The knife wounds are postmortem—making them part of his ritual, not his MO. The fact that he knows most women have a set of steak knives in their kitchen, which means he doesn’t have to risk hauling knives with him, indicates organization. Not disorganization.”

There was quiet for a moment before Art Rooney spoke up. Rooney had a crew cut and a military politeness and formality to him. He had once called the Quantico Marine Base home. “So we’re adjusting our profile to indicate a mixture of organization and disorganization.”

Vail hesitated. “I haven’t had much time to digest this. At this point, I’d have to say yes. If not almost completely organized.”

“Did the vic have defensive wounds?” Rooney’s slow, Southern demeanor seemed to be out of sync with the rest of the profilers’ urgent tones.

“None. Which again suggests this guy is planning his approach better, possibly using guile and disguise to comfort his vics before he takes them out. Definitely organized.”

Rooney frowned and his eyes again found the screen. “But the mess, the blood. . . .”

Vail respected Rooney’s profiling abilities and understood his point: typically, a crime scene like Melanie Hoffman’s indicated a disorganized offender, one of lower intelligence who did less planning. Their attacks tended to be blitzlike, creating more blood. Vail paged through the slides to the murals. “I think we’re looking at a series of paintings here. I’m having prints of these sent over to BSU for analysis. There might be some deep-seated message in here. I’ve also asked for them to be examined by an expert in Impressionist art, in case the offender had art training.”

“An artiste. That’s a new one,” Frank Del Monaco said, his round, saggy face contorting into a smirk. He glanced at a few of his colleagues, who shared the ridicule. “But I can’t disagree. He certainly left . . . an impression.”

Laughter erupted just before the conference room door opened and a long male shadow spilled into the room. Thomas Gifford walked in and observed the levity; a few of the agents were still guffawing. Gifford then looked at Vail, whose stern face indicated she was not sharing the joke.

Vail locked eyes with Del Monaco. “I don’t want to miss anything, Frank. Thinking out of the box is supposed to be a strength here.”

Gifford marched to Vail’s side and stood in front of the screen. The room became silent. The blood mural covered his dark suit and face with a red pall as he spoke. “Just a heads-up. I got word late yesterday that Senator Eleanor Linwood has requested—or more like told—Fairfax PD’s Chief Thurston to add her lead security detail agent to the Dead Eyes Task Force. His name is Chase Hancock. Ring a bell to anyone?”

Frank Del Monaco spoke. “The asshole who sued the Bureau because he didn’t get one of our seats.”

“That’s the one,” Gifford said. “Now let me warn you people. This guy is trouble. But the police chief is doing the senator a favor. Some backroom political maneuvering. She wants to look tough on crime in an election year. That democrat, Redmond, is breathing down her throat in the early polls and she thinks she can use Dead Eyes to boost her approval rating.”

“So we get dragged into shoveling their political bullshit,” van Owen said.

“We’re thirty miles from DC,” Gifford said. “They’ve got a list of shit shovelers there dating back two hundred years.”

Rooney coughed a deep, raspy gurgling, then cleared his throat and asked, “Any chance we can do an end run around this? I’ve known assholes with more brains than this Hancock chump.”

“Easiest way to be rid of him is to draw up the best goddamn profile you’ve ever done. Give the dicks a write-up that’s right on the money, something they can run with. Otherwise, stay out of Hancock’s way. That’s how we play it. Do your jobs, and let him do his. If he gets to be a problem, let me know and I’ll handle it.”

“Let him hang himself,” Vail said.

“Exactly.” Gifford dipped his chin in her direction, handing the discussion back to Vail, and then took a seat in the back of the room.

Vail hit the next slide, a wide-angle view of the exterior of the house. “Bledsoe is checking into Melanie Hoffman’s past and present accounting firms. It’s possible whoever did her might have met her through the workplace. Co-workers, clients, support staff, everyone’s being looked at. There’s also an ex-husband. Marriage was annulled three years ago.”

She hit the remote a few more times, showing the photos of what was once a beautiful young woman. Again and again slides flicked across the screen, the latest one being a close-up of Melanie’s head and trunk.

“This is his fourth victim.” Vail said it as if they should feel shame for not having helped catch the offender before he’d taken another young life.

“You mean third. This is his third vic,” Del Monaco said. “That last one wasn’t the same guy.”

“You know my thoughts on that.” And indeed he did. Everyone knew her opinion, because a year ago, when Dead Eyes had last struck, she made her opinion well-known.

“What does Bledsoe think?”

Vail glared at Del Monaco. “He’s operating under the same assumption.”

“Uh huh.”

“What’s your problem, Frank?”

“All we have with that other vic is a very loose connection to Dead Eyes. Vic was killed and disemboweled. That’s it. No wrapping of the intestines around the thigh, no stabbing of the eyes, no severing of the hand, almost no other signature evidence. We’ve seen scenes like that a hundred times before. Nothing links the vic, or the offender, to Dead Eyes.”

Vail scanned the faces in the room. No one seemed to be disagreeing with Del Monaco. If anything, their expressions seemed to put the onus on her to prove his opinion wrong. But her brain was foggy from the rotten night’s sleep and she didn’t feel like getting into it with him. She tried to focus. Before her brain had the sense to back off, her mouth was moving. “True, the eyes weren’t stabbed. So what?”

“So what?” Del Monaco looked around the room, as if to garner support for his consternation. Since most gazes remained on Vail, he turned his attention back to her. “So, Karen, the signature is all wrong. Just about all the behaviors are missing. You’ve got some parallel aspects between the killings but there’s no linkage.”

“We’ve been through all this before,” another profiler said.

“Copycat,” Hutchings said. “That’s all it was, if you could even call it that.”

Vail was shaking her head in disagreement. “You’re all missing the point. True, there are things the offender didn’t do with this victim, but I believe it’s the same guy. I mean, just look at the crime scene.”

“We looked, a year ago,” Rooney said. His voice was even more scratchy now. “There’s no convincing linkage there.”

“Art, there were only a few defensive wounds, and there was a lot of blood.” She stopped, then realized she should review the photos from the scene, in case the offender had left the same murals. If she recalled, there was no blood at all on the walls. If that was correct, it would do nothing to support her linkage theory.

“Were there any Impressionist blood murals?” Del Monaco asked.

“I’ll have to check—”

“And what about food? Did he eat his usual peanut butter and cream cheese ketchup sandwich at the scene, postmortem?”

“No.”

“And the incapacitating blow?” Del Monaco was flipping pages as he spoke.

“Disabling skull wound. Same as vics one and two—”

“You can’t say that, Karen.” This from Rooney, whose eyes were fixed on a particular document. “You can’t say it was the same. Vics one and two were hit from behind, the other one from the side.”

“So she suddenly realized what was happening and turned her head at the last second.”

“When you turn your head to duck, you throw your hands up. It would’ve broken a few fingers. Hell, even a nail or two.” Rooney held up the file. “There were no such defensive wounds.”

There was quiet. Vail felt as if she’d been cross-examined and the defense attorney had just made a case-breaking point. But even as she tried to concentrate on a reply, she felt Gifford’s stare boring into her, disrupting her concentration.

She knew what he was thinking. It wasn’t the same way she knew what Robby Hernandez was thinking. She knew what to expect because she’d already gone toe to toe with Gifford about linkage of this victim to the Dead Eyes killer.

With his arms folded across his wide chest, it was as if Gifford wanted Vail to put her foot in her mouth. And unfortunately, she was about to accommodate him.

“Look at the facts, Karen,” Del Monaco said. It was as if he had suddenly realized Gifford was still in the room, and was now playing to him. “Just about none of the behaviors were present in the third scene that were present in the first two. Think about it logically. It’s a different guy.”

Telling her to think about it logically was like saying she was being irrational. At least, that’s the way she saw it. But she didn’t want to blow it all out of proportion and claim he’d said that because she was a woman. It pissed her off regardless. “I believe the offender was interrupted before he had a chance to finish what he’d started. That’s why the crime scene looked different.” Admitting the crime scene looked different threw water on her fire, killed her entire argument. Such major variations in crime scenes often meant a different killer was involved. This wasn’t lost on Gifford.

“The crime scene did look different, didn’t it, Agent Vail?”

Gifford was leaning back, an attorney asking a hostile witness a damaging question to which he knew the answer.

Vail wondered how much of this was fallout from their prior altercation in the library. “Because the offender was interrupted,” she said. “Otherwise, we’d be seeing the same ritualistic behavior we’ve seen in his other crime scenes.”

“That’s assuming it’s the same offender.”

She clenched her jaw. They were breaking all the rules of what the session was about. It was supposed to be a free-thinking exchange of ideas, not an attack.

“Pretty damn clear,” Del Monaco said. “We have no reason to think it’s the same guy.”

Several other agents nodded their heads, and like grains of sand sliding through her fingers, she felt control slipping away.

“We had this debate a year or so ago, right?” Gifford asked. “Until we have convincing evidence to think otherwise, we need to put this to rest. It’s time to move on.”

Vail set the remote down and flipped her file folder shut. “That’s all I have.” She glanced over her shoulder at the image of a blood mural spilling over the screen’s edge, the indelible picture of Melanie Hoffman’s defaced torso embedded in her mind. She faced her colleagues, who were reclining in their seats, looking at her. “Thanks for all your input.”

She gathered her belongings and headed out the door.

ten

He had another burst of inspiration and found himself running to the keyboard. He sat pecking away at the keys, the words flying onto the document as if being spray painted onto the screen.

“Where the hell are you, you little runt? Come here and play with me!”

I cover my ears and close my eyes, even though it’s dark in here. So dark, I’m sometimes scared. But I’m safe. I can do anything I want in here, and he can’t stop me. I can stay here for hours and hours. He never wonders where I am unless he wants me. As long as I don’t answer him, he thinks I’m outside, hiding somewhere on the ranch. He knows he’d never find me until I’m ready to come home. All that land is good for hiding, too. I can sleep out with the stars, I can see them all at night, it’s so dark, so very dark.

But my place here is warm and secret. I’ve brought stuff in here with me, made it my home. Besides, I can watch him from here. I know where he is. As long as he doesn’t find me—

“Son of a bitch, where the fuck are you?”

I hear the back door open and slam shut. Looking for me. He wants me again.

I hate his smell, his dirty nails, his crooked teeth, and beer breath. I hate his yellow pee-stained underwear.

I hate him.

No more of this. No more pain.

No more—

He jumped up from his chair and stood in front of his desk, the laptop screen glowing, the cursor blinking, his face damp with cold sweat. So powerful. So vivid the memories, yet so far away, so very long ago. He had to find a vehicle for these thoughts, these memories. He thought on that for a moment but nothing useful came to him, not yet, at least. He wiped his face with a sleeve, then walked over to his workbench, where he folded a soft diaper into a precise square, then huffed a cloud of fog onto the brass badge and buffed it hard. Three times. Rub, rub, rub. The smudges wiped away, leaving behind the emblem of authority. Power.

He reinserted the badge into his credentials wallet and slipped the leather case into his suit coat pocket. He reviewed the surveillance pictures he’d taken of Sandra Franks, the woman who’d caught his attention a few days ago. Yes, she was an evil one all right. As he flipped through the photos, his jaw tightened. Definitely evil.

“This evening’s prize is a thirty-year-old dental hygienist originally from Tallahassee, Florida,” he announced with game-show-host vigor. “She skis in the winter, swims in the summer, and lifts weights year-round. A fine physical specimen. Dennis, tell her what she’s won.”

He chuckled and began swinging his legs beneath his chair. Three times forward, followed by a clicking of his heels. Click click click. Three times; that’s just the way it had to be.

He put the photos down, then slipped the pipe into the handmade holster on his belt.

“It’s time! We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz. The wizard of Oz! Ozzie, Ozzie and Harriet. Harriet, the original bitch. Bitch, bitch, that’s all she does. Bitch, bitch, I’ll get that bitch!”

He shrugged into his suit coat, smoothed down the lapels, then appraised his tie in the mirror. He straightened it, then tightened it. Patted down the faux mustache, checked it from all angles. Next was a wool overcoat, topped off with a black Stetson hat.

He stopped by the hall mirror and regarded his reflection. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled the FBI credentials case. He flipped it open as he’d done a hundred times before and tilted his chin back. “FBI, ma’am. Please open the door. I need your help.” I need your soul. I need your . . . Eyes.

eleven

The pulsed tones of her BlackBerry made Vail jump as she rounded the corner a few blocks from her house. She fished through her pocket and rooted out the device, which displayed a missed call from Robby. Alternating her gaze between the dark, rain-slick roadway and the touch pad, she phoned him back.

As it rang, the intermittent rain returned and began pelting her windshield with a fury. She fumbled for the wiper control as Robby answered.

“Got a call from Bledsoe,” he said. “Neighbor found a body, 609 Herrington. He said it sounds like our guy. He’s en route, at least fifteen out, asked me to call you.”

“I’m only about half a mile away.”

“I’m not too far myself. Meet you over there.”

The house was a modest one-story brick colonial, the lawn and planters in need of a gardener. A candy apple red Hyundai Sonata was parked in the driveway, a police cruiser behind it, kissing its bumper.

Vail pulled up to the curb, her headlights catching the tear-smeared face of a woman in her fifties standing beneath the porch overhang. Her eyes were puffy, her legs dancing from the cold. A uniformed officer stood beside her.

Vail displayed her credentials as she approached the house.

“Sandy!” the woman whined. “Sandy, she’s in there, she’s . . . oh, God. She’s—”

“Did you clear the house?” Vail asked the young cop.

“No, when I saw the victim, I left everything as it was and got the hell out. I didn’t want to compromise—”

“Wait right here,” Vail told the woman. “Stay with the officer.”

Vail drew her Glock, holding it in a white knuckle grip as she pushed open the front door. Complete darkness. A sudden crack of thunder in the near distance sent another few cc’s of adrenaline cascading into her bloodstream.

A metallic smell stung her nose as she walked into the tile entryway. Blood. Death. Slowly into the hall, her pupils large black holes. Heart thumping, sweat popping out across the back of her shoulders.

Off in the distance, above the din of pouring rain striking pavement . . . footsteps.

Rapid, like her heart. The chambering of a round. A semiautomatic . . . a large one. She pressed her back against the wall and waited in the darkness. The footfalls stopped suddenly, and she could feel the presence of a body as it moved down the carpeted hallway toward her. Breathing.

She slid into a crouch and squinted so the whites of her eyes did not reflect a light source and give away her position. A large body turned the corner a few feet away. It was Robby.

She let air escape from her lips and her shoulders slumped in relaxation. “Scared the shit out of me.”

“Vic?”

“Haven’t found her yet.”

They walked in tandem toward what appeared to be the bedroom. But before they reached the door, Vail saw something in the darkness smeared across the walls. Blood. Murals.

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

Vail pushed her right shoe against the bedroom door and swung it open. They stood in the doorway and stared at the young woman splayed out across her bed, filleted in the abdomen, and skewered through the eyes.

A flicker of lightning followed by a brilliant flash poured in through the open bedroom window. Vail’s eye caught something in the yard, and she again tightened the grip on her sidearm, her head swiveling, eyes searching—

“What’s the matter?”

“He’s out there,” she said, moving down the hallway.

“Who’s out there?”

She pulled her cell and hit “9,” connecting her with FBI dispatch. “This is Agent Karen Vail with CIRG. Get an air unit over to 609 Herrington. Potential sighting of Dead Eyes suspect.” She dropped the phone into her pocket as she ran into the kitchen. Grabbed the knob, yanked open the door.

HE SAW HER, some woman cop, through the bedroom window. She was right there, thirty feet away in the darkness, admiring his artwork. Just what he needed, another critic.

But somehow she knew he was there. He darted through the bushes but stopped when he cut his hand on a sharp branch. He found a safe place to crouch while he licked the blood, to taste it, see what it was like.

Running his tongue across the open wound stung. He didn’t think it would hurt so much. At least he tasted better than that slut Sandra did. She was satisfying, but predictably bitter with a strong aftertaste. More iron, less copper. Maybe he was a bit anemic.

He swiveled around, staying behind some bushes. Watching for movement. That bitch cop was going to be coming after him, and he had to be ready.

ROBBY’S .40-CALIBER GLOCK was out in front of him now, his back against the left door frame. Vail was facing him, pressed against the opposite side of the doorway.

“How do you know? How do you know he’s here?”

“I saw something, when the lightning lit up the yard. I feel him.”

In the next half second, Vail was outside, the rain pouring, another rumble of thunder crawling across the horizon. She made her way through the side yard with reckless abandon, pushing away the thick, overgrown brush with her free forearm. Robby was five feet behind her, slipping on the thick weeds and bushes that hadn’t been pruned back in years.

“Karen, where the hell are you going?”

THERE SHE IS! He knew it! Running into the yard—looking for him—but going in the wrong direction. He crouched lower. Thick, woody bushes and a dark suit . . . good cover. He was fairly safe, if only for a short time. But as any good prey who wants to survive knows, you need to get a close look at the hunter. Assess his strengths and weaknesses. After all, even though he knew there’d be no way they’d find him, he still had to be vigilant in making sure he didn’t give them too much. Tempting fate was not a smart thing to do.

He put his head back and sniffed. Sucked in deeply. Smelled her scent riding the breeze that carried the rain droplets against his face. Light scent, perfume, with a hint of fear and anger. Yes, she was angry. Very angry.

“KAREN, SLOW DOWN. He could be setting a trap—”

“Shh!” Vail hissed into the darkness, which was illuminated by an obscure moon hiding behind engorged rain clouds. She cut left round a tree but slipped and went down hard. “Goddamnit!”

“You okay?” Robby’s voice was behind her, a dozen feet or so.

Another bolt of lightning cracked the sky and lit up the yard, which seemed to go on for a rolling acre of pines, firs, and wild shrubs. Robby was now at Vail’s side, his gaze bouncing around the flora. He grasped her by the right arm and lifted her up.

“He’s here,” she whispered.

“You sure?”

She nodded, though she knew Robby’s eyes were on the surrounding shrubs and bushes. Gun in his right hand, legs spread wide and bent slightly at the knees. He was ready, but the question was, ready for what?

“Where?” he asked.

She smelled something on the breeze. Sniffed, crinkled her nose. A scent she couldn’t readily identify . . . as well as an odor she knew too well: Blood. She looked around, wishing she could hit a switch and turn on the sun, if only for a minute. Get a good look around. So damn close—

“Karen?”

“I don’t know, I just feel him. Saw something in the yard when the lightning hit. I looked over, saw movement. He was watching us.”

“Like an arsonist coming back to watch his handiwork.”

Vail didn’t answer. She stood there, her left knee throbbing something fierce and bug bite itches prickling her legs. But the most irritating itch of all was the mental one: her need to know why the offender had waited there when he could’ve been long gone. She had tracked these killers for years from a distance. Glossy black-and-white and color photos in a file folder, interview forms, witness statements. It was all so removed. This was more visceral, urgent, and real-time.

Up close and personal.

twelve

He never had a subconscious desire to get caught, as some killers did.

He only got a glimpse of her, but she was good, this woman cop. He could tell. Just a bitch with a badge, but still . . . she was someone he couldn’t be sloppy around. She somehow knew he was there ... as if they shared some kind of sixth sense. The thought sickened him. He hated sharing anything with bitches, let alone his mind.

After that last bolt of lightning had lit up the sky, he took off, scampering through several untended yards. He then sat in his car for a few minutes and panted hard to slow his breathing just in case the police were lurking down the street.

He started the engine and headed home, taking care to stick to the speed limit, signal properly, and make his full stops. He’d once read that a lot of criminals got caught by the police for stupid things, like having a burnt-out brake light. He couldn’t imagine that—going through all the hard work and planning, executing perfectly, and then getting pulled over for some inane traffic violation.

Thirty minutes later, he was back at his loft tuning in to the eleven o’clock news. Their lead story: the murder of another bitch ... but, of course, that’s not what the reporter called her. His words were something like, “A young woman, another apparent victim of the Dead Eyes killer.” Interesting name they gave him—but not far from the truth, actually.

He watched as a woman they identified as an FBI profiler ducked through the crowd of press corps. She dropped her head and threw up a hand, avoiding the camera as if it would give her skin cancer. He waited until the segment was over, then replayed the recording he’d made. He was looking for one thing in particular.

There! There it was . . . a single frame with a dark, blurry view of her beady little eyes. He hadn’t seen them when she was chasing him, hunting him down. But there was something about them. The paused picture was grainy and small, most of her face was blocked, and the image jumped a little as he stared at it. But there was something about the eyes. . . .

The TV picture suddenly snapped back to life and the recording began playing again. He let it run and again listened to the reporter drone on, making some comment about how important the case was because a profiler had been assigned. But it didn’t bother him. It really wasn’t that big a deal. Because he knew they could examine his artwork and look inside his head all they wanted. They would never find him.

thirteen

As soon as the press heard the calls from Fairfax County PD on their police scanners, TV news vans mobilized. They set up shop at Sandra Franks’s house and telescoped their microwave antennae into the sky, as if plugging into the clouds to eavesdrop on God.

But there was no God at this crime scene, or so it seemed to those with even a rudimentary understanding of religious belief. God would not have allowed Sandra Franks to be murdered. God would not have created monsters capable of committing such heinous acts.

“Damn reporters,” Vail said.

“Just doing their job,” Robby said. “Cut ’em some slack.”

“I don’t like them blocking my way and shoving mikes in my face. I’m here to do a job, too, and they’re in the way.”

They stood in the back of the room, staring at the walls, at more murals. Hancock had arrived and was waiting outside with Manette and Bledsoe until the forensic unit had finished documenting the scene. Since Vail and Robby had already been in the house, they figured it was best to stay put rather than tramp through the evidence again.

“So what do you think it all means?”

“This guy is very bold, Robby. A lot of serial killers prey on prostitutes.” She turned to him. “You know why?”

“Because they won’t be missed.”

“Exactly. No one would know they’re missing for days, weeks, sometimes months. By then, the trail is cold.” A technician’s camera flashed. “So the question is, why is this guy picking middle-class women? What is it about them that feeds his fantasy?”

“He knows one that he hates.”

“Or knew one. His fantasy goes back a long time, don’t forget.”

Hancock came up behind them and caught sight of the far wall, where the offender’s “It’s in the” message was scrawled. “I get it,” he said under his breath. “I get it! It’s like a puzzle you can’t figure out, and then when you do, it’s so damn obvious you can’t believe you didn’t see it before.”

Vail’s eyes found Robby’s in a sideways glance.

“He’s hidden something,” Hancock continued. “The hand, he’s telling us where the hand is. The left hand. He’s telling us it’s in the house. It’s in the drawer, it’s in the refrigerator, in the bedroom—”

“It’s in your head,” Vail said. “You can’t assume it means anything.”

Hancock turned away. “You’re wrong. He’s telling us something.”

“He could also be a whacko.” Vail shifted her gaze to Robby. “At this point, all we can say is that either the offender is a nut job—in which case his message means nothing—or that he’s quite sane and it carries great meaning to him. The fact that he used the victim’s blood tells us it was likely done postmortem. She was either badly injured or dead. And if she’s dead, which is likely, then he’s taking a huge risk to spend more time there. Longer he’s there, more chance he gets caught. For what? If we go with the odds, he’s not a whacko. So the message means a great deal to him. But it’s not intended for him. It’s meant for the victim, or for whoever discovers the body.”

Vail paced a few steps back and forth, reasoning it through. “If it’s a message for us, we have to ask: What’s he trying to tell us? Is it something that’s true? Or something that’s false? Is it literal . . . do we have to start looking for something—the hand, like Hancock is suggesting? Or is he taunting, playing with us?”

Vail stopped, regarded Robby for a moment. “Do you see why you can’t jump to conclusions about any of this?” She looked at Hancock, who was staring at the wall, attempting to appear as if he hadn’t heard what she had said.

But suddenly, he turned toward her. “And sometimes you can overthink something, Detective Hernandez. That’s what your friend is doing here. She knows so much, she’s trying to impress you, confuse you with issues and questions and all sorts of bullshit that’s got nothing to do with anything.”

Vail’s arms were clenched across her chest. “The only bullshit in the room, Robby, is what Hancock’s dishing up. But you know what? This message could be bullshit, too. There was a case where the offender wrote ‘Death to the pigs’ in blood. It was so Hollywood, it was weird. It scored pretty high on the bullshit radar for me. Turned out he took the phrase from a Life magazine article, and he wrote it at the scene to throw us off. You know how long people spent mulling over ‘Death to the pigs’? Was it meant for cops, or did he just hate pork?”

Robby laughed.

Vail placed a hand on his forearm. “Listen to me, Robby. Right now we can’t make any assumptions about it. You want to help Hancock look for the missing hand, go for it. Maybe you’ll find it—or you’ll find something else. I don’t know. But to me, the most significant thing to consider from that message is that the offender took the time to write it in the first place. It meant a lot to him, and it’s my job to find out why.”

“He didn’t finish the sentence,” said Sinclair, who had just walked in the door. “You’re talking about the message, right? What I want to know is, why didn’t the fucker finish the sentence?”

“Good question,” Vail said.

“Maybe he wants us to finish it for him,” Robby said.

Hancock threw up his hands. “Which is what I’ve been trying to do. It’s in the kitchen, it’s in the drawer, it’s in the closet. . . .” He walked out of the bedroom, still muttering.

“He okay?” Sinclair asked.

“He’s never been okay.”

Robby asked, “So what do we do next with this message?”

“We can run it through VICAP. Bureau keeps a database of crime stats just for this reason. It’ll give us a rundown of other cases where offenders have written messages in blood—in any bodily fluid, for that matter. It’ll tell us what we know about those cases and those offenders. Maybe we can make some connections or establish some patterns or parallels. Offenders don’t leave messages very often, so it’s a pretty isolated type of activity. Database is going to be small.”

“Meantime, we keep plugging away and asking questions.”

“The day we stop asking questions,” Vail said, “is the day we should turn in our badges.”

TWO HOURS LATER, the task force members were huddled in their new base of operations, which had been haphazardly thrown together over the past two days.

It was an old brick house two miles from the latest victim’s home, on a mature street with seventy-five-year-old houses. The rooms were dark, lit only by incandescent lamps standing on the floor. Long shadows loomed across the walls, and everyone’s faces—being lit from below—looked like something out of a Bela Lugosi horror flick.

A couple of plastic folding tables had been opened in the middle of what had previously been a rectangular living room. There were no shades or blinds on the windows, and the continuous pelting of the glass by the wind and rain created streaks of water blown across the slick surface.

“We got a telephone here?” Mandisa Manette asked.

“Not yet,” Bledsoe said. He lifted a medium-size cardboard box from a stack in the corner of the room and dropped it on one of the card tables. He leaned back and swatted at the dust that rose from the box. “I ordered five lines. Four for voice and DSL, one for fax. Be here in a day or two. Till then use your cell.”

Bledsoe ripped open the box and removed a few rubber-banded markers. He looked around the room and craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the kitchen. “Who are we missing?”

“Hancock,” Vail said. “I say we start without him.”

Bledsoe smirked, then leaned close to Vail’s ear. “Lay off, okay? The guy may be an asshole, but I’d rather not poison the pool. Let the others find out for themselves. I don’t need any trouble, none of us do. Just cooperate with him.”

“Yeah, yeah, fine.”

“You okay, your knee? Hernandez said you twisted it.”

“Went down in the vic’s yard.”

“You need to go? Get it taken care of?”

“I’m good. Don’t worry about it.”

Bledsoe nodded, then spun around. “Okay, everyone into the living room. Let’s get started.”

The front door swung open and in walked Chase Hancock. He closed his umbrella and shook the water onto the linoleum floors that were already slick from the detectives’ muddy shoes.

Hancock glanced around, then crinkled his nose. “Who chose this rat hole?”

“We wanted to make you feel at home,” Vail said, “but we can’t get the stench right.”

“Cute, Vail, very cute.”

Bledsoe waited for everyone to situate themselves, then took his place at the head of the room. “This is going to be our home until we catch this guy. The accommodations are pretty crappy. I’ve got eyes, I can see. You don’t have to tell me. I’m having some stuff done on the place over the next week or so, to make it functional. One thing it won’t be is nice or comfortable. They don’t want us getting too cozy here. Feeling is, if we like our surroundings, we won’t be in any rush to solve the case.” Moans erupted. Bledsoe held up a hand. “I know it’s crap, but I’m just telling you how it is. Now, I know it’s late—what the hell time is it?” He pulled back his sleeve to see his watch.

“Eleven-thirty,” Bubba Sinclair said.

“Jesus. Okay then,” Bledsoe continued. “Let’s get started so we can all get home sometime before the sun comes up.”

Vail thought of Jonathan and remembered she had an appointment with an attorney in the morning. She had already called in to get the time off, and she would have to pull Jonathan out of school. But it was the first step in getting him out of Deacon’s reach.

“Our guy struck again this evening. Vic named Sandra Franks. Dental hygienist with a doc on the west side. Hey, Hernandez, you’re tall. Why don’t you write all this down on the whiteboard?” He tossed Robby the bunch of rubber-banded colored markers.

“What does being tall have to do with—”

“It’s late, let’s just get through this so we can go home.”

Robby stepped up to the whiteboard and wrote, “Sandra Franks, dental hygienist.”

“Dental hygienists are weird. They work P-T at lots of different offices,” Manette said.

Bledsoe nodded. “Which means our workload just increased. Sin, find out what other docs she works for and while you’re at it, round up their patient lists. Perp might be on there.”

“Will they give us their patient lists? Confidentiality—”

“Come on,” Manette said. “Who’s gonna get bent outta shape over a freaking root canal? They give you problems, lean on ’em. They’re dentists, they don’t want no trouble. Besides, we’re not asking for their records, just a list. You want, I’ll do it.”

Sinclair’s bald head flushed with anger. “I can handle it.”

“Good,” Bledsoe said. “There’s a bunch of things we’re working on, so I put together a quick summary of what’s going on and who’s doing what. You can add Sin’s assignment to the bottom.”

“How do you want to handle the perp’s message?” Manette asked.

Bledsoe pulled a small spiral notepad from his sport coat pocket, flipped a couple of pages. “‘It’s in the . . . ,’” he mumbled. He shook his head, then said, “I think we should attack this like we would any other piece of evidence. Karen, you have any new thoughts on this?”

“Nothing I’m willing to share just yet.”

“Look, I know you don’t like to guess, but right now we’ve got nothing to go on. Even a guess would send us in a direction. Might be the wrong one, but it could also be the right one.”

“I’ve got one,” Hancock said.

Vail rolled her eyes. “Here we go.”

“I think it means he’s playing with us, taunting us, daring us to find the severed hand.”

“And?” Bledsoe asked. “Did you find it?”

“Not yet, but—”

“Look, Bledsoe, you wanted my opinion, I’ll give it to you,” Vail said. “Right now there are too many possibilities. So I’ll tell you what my gut says. This message meant a lot to this offender. He took great risks to leave it for us. I don’t think it’s taunting per se, but I think he’s trying to tell us something without directly telling us. He doesn’t want to make it too easy. But bottom line is, there is meaning in it. Just what that meaning is, I don’t have a clue and a hunch wouldn’t be worth anything. Hancock’s got a hunch and it means nothing.”

“To hell with you, Vail,” Hancock yelled. “You’ve been on my case since the minute I walked through the vic’s door. What did I ever do to you?”

Bledsoe shook his head in disgust. “Okay, all right, enough.” He turned to Vail. “He’s right, Karen, lose the attitude.”

“Damn straight,” Hancock said.

“I’m consulting VICAP, see if we get any hits on similar cases,” Vail said calmly.

“Who’s got the vic’s employers?” Sinclair asked.

“Hernandez,” Bledsoe said, “that’s yours. Check out the people the vics worked for. Then check out their customers. Anything pops up that’s even possibly suspicious, let’s all discuss it.”

“Got it, boss.”

They spent the next two hours running scenarios and making phone calls and assembling lists. The usual bone-grinding police work. As they rose to disperse, Bledsoe gave a quick whistle. “Before I forget. Expenses. Save your receipts, give ’em to me in an envelope marked with your name every Monday for the previous week. Make sure you write down what each receipt is for. I’ll get them to admin at my house and they’ll send it through internal review. So don’t be ordering no three-course meals. Now go home and get some rest. We’ll meet here every morning at eight. You can’t make it, let me know. We’re on flex time, but I don’t want anyone taking advantage. We got us a killer to catch, and each day, each hour, each minute that passes we don’t get something accomplished means some other woman is closer to being cut up. Clear?”

Everyone nodded, then dispersed. Vail walked over to Hancock, who tilted his chin back and looked down his nose at her. She said, “I think you were right, Hancock. About the artistic feel to the murals. Just wanted you to know.”

Hancock regarded her for a few seconds before responding. “You know, I could’ve done your job, Vail. I could’ve been a profiler.”

Vail pulled a stick of gum from her pocket and folded it into her mouth. “What do you want me to say? Wasn’t my decision.”

“That’s what you want to think. No guilt that way. But I’m over it, I’ve got a good job. And I’m in charge. I don’t need to take any orders from superiors. I call the shots.”

“Glad it worked out.” Vail turned to gather her papers, but Hancock grabbed her arm.

“I know you said some bad things about me.” His voice was low, as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear. “I won’t forget that.”

Vail’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t threaten me, Hancock. Nothing you say or do scares me. You come at me, I’ll crush you under my heel. Don’t you forget that.”

Vail grabbed her leather messenger bag and winked at Robby, then walked out the door.

fourteen

Charcoal gray thunderclouds threatened a downpour, but thus far they had held their load. Karen Vail had a ten o’clock appointment with her family law attorney but stopped at Deacon’s house on the way. If there was an amicable solution to the custody issue—meaning no attorneys involved—she wanted to find it. She liked her attorney but had no desire to fund another of his five-star resort vacations.

She didn’t think Deacon would go for it, but she was prepared to make a Mafia-style offer: one he couldn’t refuse . . . one that would waive her rights to the house. If there was one way to get at the armored organ Deacon once called a heart, it was through his wallet.

Vail stood at the peeling steel gray wood door and felt like a trespasser. It’d only been eighteen months since she had moved out, but in that time she had become a different person. A person who couldn’t stand the man who owned the house she used to call her own. She put her hands on her hips and glanced down at her feet. Did she really want to ring this bell? Did she really want to see Deacon?

She could go through her attorney, have him handle everything, and never have to see her ex’s face again. But if she could appeal to the side of him she used to love, the good-natured, hard-working soul that shriveled into oblivion, maybe get him to agree—

The wood door swung open and revealed a disheveled forty-year old man, leather-grained face and wild, pepper-colored hair. A stained white T-shirt hung over faded jeans. He may have stood near five-eleven, but his large-boned frame and new paunch made him look larger than that. He stepped closer to the screen door. “The fuck you doing here?”

Vail immediately marveled at how an individual could descend so quickly, and completely, into Dante’s Inferno.

“You knock? Didn’t hear a knock.”

“I was about to ring the bell.”

“You didn’t answer me. What the fuck do you want?”

“I wanted to talk to you about Jonathan.”

“What about?”

“Can I come in?”

Deacon pushed the screen door open and nearly struck Vail in the face. He turned and headed into the darkness. Bargain basement furniture adorned the living room. It was the same assortment of couches and recliners Vail had wanted to throw out—Good Will and Salvation Army turned her down—but after being out of work awhile, Deacon didn’t want to spend money on new pieces. “These work just fine for me,” he had said at the time. As if he was the only one who lived there.

Vail glanced at the issues of Penthouse and Jugs strewn across the coffee table and cringed at the thought that Jonathan was being exposed to this on a regular basis. These were things she would mention should they end up in court, to paint a picture of the home environment Deacon provided.

Deacon bent over and turned off the television. “So?”

“Jonathan’s not happy here, Deacon. From what I gather, you’re not happy having him here, either.”

“Don’t be speaking for me. He’s my boy, a man needs his boy around. A boy needs his father.”

Normally, Vail wouldn’t argue with that statement. But since Deacon was the father—

“So if that’s all you came to talk to me about, I’d say we’re about done.”

But Vail didn’t like being dictated to, and she despised his flippant attitude. Her heart began pounding. Anger swelled. No, not just anger. Hatred. Where had the man gone she’d loved so many years ago?

“I came to offer you something,” she said. “For Jonathan. Give me full custody and I’ll waive all my rights to the house.”

Deacon walked over to her and stood three inches from her face. A common intimidation tactic used during interrogation was to invade someone’s space. Vail had been taught the technique by a seasoned NYPD detective. For Deacon, it came naturally.

Vail was not about to yield her ground. She knew how the game was played, so she stood there and stared into the man’s dark eyes, his beer breath battering her nose.

He rested his hands on his hips and looked down at her. “You have a lot of nerve, coming here, thinking you can buy my son from me.”

“He’s not happy, Deacon. If you want what’s best for him, take my offer. Full custody for me, the house is all yours. No strings.”

Deacon clenched his jaw. “I don’t think you heard me, Karen. Answer’s no.”

“What possible reason would you have for wanting him around, if all you’re going to do is put him down all the time?”

“Is that what he says?” Deacon shook his head. “Fucking kids. None of ’em tell the truth. It’s like a disease.”

“I believe him, Deacon. Jonathan has no reason to lie to me.”

“Well, whoop-dee-do for you, Miss Perfect Parent.”

“If you won’t take my offer, I’m gonna go back to court, let the judge decide.”

Deacon’s face curled into a snarl. “You bitch. Do that and you’ll be sorry.”

Vail smirked and shook her head. “I don’t respond to your threats anymore, Deacon. There’s nothing you can do to hurt me.”

With that, Vail felt something hook behind her right foot—and Deacon’s right hand push against her chest. She was moving backward faster than she could react, and a second later her head struck the wood floor in an explosion of blinding pain.

fifteen

I awake with a start. I realize I’d fallen asleep in my room. Shit! He’s coming. Creaky floorboards. Heavy footsteps.

Before I fell asleep, he was with a whore. I know her, she’s been here before. I’ve seen her eyes, the way she looks at him. They’re mean eyes.

The door swings open and my father stands there, his overalls unbuttoned at the top, the straps dangling at his sides.

“There was someone here.”

He sneers. “She was a bitch, I got rid of her.”

“I didn’t like her.”

“Yeah, well, she didn’t like you none, either. She thought you were bad. Ugly. Just like your mama saw you.”

Mother. She didn’t know what it meant to be a mother. She couldn’t have. She was a bitch, just like the ones he brings home.

“Let me tell you something, them bitches are real bad. They see you as trash. Ugly, rotting trash. The whores always say mean things about you. They say you’re ugly and you’re lucky to have a father like me who takes care of you.”

Lucky is not the word I use to describe my life.

He comes over to the bed and I’m waiting for the belt to come whipping at me. I shy away, waiting. . . .

“It’s your mama of a whore’s fault you’re ugly. She made you this way.”

I lift my head slowly, still waiting for the leather to snap against my skin. But I notice he’s not wearing a belt.

“Time for a haircut, your hair’s gettin’ too long! Come on, now!”

He grabs me and pulls me off the bed—

Amazing stuff! He realized he had to do something with it, publish it somewhere. He could use someone else’s name so no one would know it was him. Or maybe I do want people to know what I endured. Fiction or nonfiction? It’s all true, but who’d believe it? They’d look at him like he was the bad one, because who wants to be associated with someone who’d been treated like that?

But there were people who would be interested in this stuff. People who’d eat it up, consider it downright brilliant. They’d read it and read it again, show it to other people, scrutinize it until they broke it down by word choice, grade level, and whatever other silly metrics they’d designed to evaluate writing.

And the cops would analyze it, too.

Let them comb through it, they’ll never get anywhere with it. Of course it meant he’d have to cover his tracks. So be it. Put it out there and see what reaction his readers had. If it came off well, maybe he’d go for a bigger audience.

He closed the laptop and yawned hard, but a jolt of pain made him wince. His face was killing him. The last bitch got in a cheap shot, a roundhouse punch that landed square and stunned him for a second. After letting him in the house, something must’ve tipped her off, because she took the first swing. But he wanted her dead a little bit more than she wanted to be alive, because after hitting him she started to run. He grabbed her arm, spun her around, and punched her back, a left and right combination, real fast. All he knew was that it hurt his knuckles. But she went down and then he got his pipe out and that was that.

He’d been on the receiving end of a beating too many times, so if you wanted to go toe to toe with him, fine, he was ready to rumble. He knew all the moves because he lived through them.

He shoved an ice pack against the lump on his forehead. The swelling had drained a bit into the side of his face and jaw, but fortunately the discoloration was easily covered by makeup. An FBI agent with a large purple and black bruise on his face would attract attention, and that was something he needed to avoid.

But if there was one thing this bitch taught him, it was that he needed to handle these encounters better, find a way of knocking them out faster, before they had a chance to swing at him. Next time it could be a knife or a broken bottle.

He made a list of possible solutions, but they all involved risk—the biggest of which was being seen in public buying a weapon. But the Internet, on the other hand, allowed him to go anywhere and do anything he wanted, without anyone scrutinizing his face or questioning his motives.

He could buy whatever he needed, within reason. A simple search brought him to numerous websites that sold stun guns, which could incapacitate a bitch for minutes at a time. All he’d have to do is touch the probe to her body—hell, even her clothing. The longer the contact, the longer the period of incapacitation.

He clicked on the Frequently Asked Questions link, and read: “Using a high pulse frequency, stun guns scramble the nervous system and make the muscles work so rapidly their source of energy converts immediately into lactic acid, exhausting and disabling the muscles. At the same time, the pulse interrupts the brain’s nerve impulses, causing the stunned individual to lose muscle control and become disoriented. This incapacitated and confused state will last two to five minutes or longer depending on body mass and. . . .”

Minutes! He only needed a few seconds, really. A few seconds to get his hands around her neck, a few seconds to squeeze the life from her body. Two hands, two eyes. Two bugged out eyes, the capillaries bursting from the pressure. . . .

He quickly paged through the website, entered the credit card number, then logged off. He’d have the package tomorrow.

It seemed almost too good to be true.

sixteen

The room spun for a second before coming back into focus. Vail blinked a few times and realized she was staring at the light fixture on her ceiling. No, not her ceiling, not anymore. Deacon’s ceiling. Deacon’s house.

The television was on, the unmistakable sound of cars racing around a track blaring from the speakers. A cigarette was burning down near the filter in an ashtray beside Deacon’s recliner. And—what the hell?—her pants were unzipped.

What time is it?

Why am I on the floor?

Why does my head hurt so much?

Vail rolled onto her side and saw Deacon’s empty Lazy Boy. Where the hell is he?

She felt like a hammer had crushed her skull. She reached back and felt a bruise, as if her head were a piece of damaged fruit. Whatever had happened, it involved Deacon. And that meant it wasn’t good.

Vail pulled herself up and stood in the middle of the living room, which tilted back and forth like a seesaw. She swayed, dizzy and wobbly, bending her knees and holding her arms out like a surfer for balance. After steadying herself, she stumbled out to her car.

She rooted around her pocket for the keys, opened the door, and drove away. Her mind was still a blur, and she was more or less driving on autopilot. She knew the way to her office without thinking—which was good, because at the moment thinking was more than her shaken brain could handle.

As she headed back toward the interstate, she struggled to recall what had transpired after arriving at Deacon’s. The dashboard clock read 10:36. Ten-thirty-six . . . she had been there an hour and a half. Whatever she had done, whatever had happened, had taken a considerable amount of time.

She remembered going there to discuss a change in Jonathan’s custody—and Deacon had been less than cooperative. Things were coming back to her, but she was still drawing blanks.

Ten-thirty. There was something she was supposed to have done at ten. What was it?

She stopped at a light and looked around. Was it something for work? Was she supposed to meet the task force somewhere? She yawned and her jaw hurt. She looked in the mirror and fought back dizziness to see half-mast eyes and frazzled hair. What the hell had happened?

Come on, Karen, think! The light turned green—and her thoughts cleared a bit. She took what she knew and mixed in a little inference . . . and figured she and Deacon had gotten into it over Jonathan’s custody. The end result she knew—an unexpected nap on Deacon’s floor, some dizziness, and one hell of a headache. He must’ve clocked her good, because she still didn’t remember it. But there was no bruising on her face.

However it went down, she only hoped she’d gotten him good, too. But judging by the fact that the TV was on and a smoke was burning in the ashtray, she probably did not get the best of the encounter.

A sprinkling drizzle began dotting her windshield. As she reached to turn on the wipers, her forearm brushed up against her holster, and oh, shit—

She slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop on the rain-slick roadway, a portfolio of papers and files stacked in the backseat flying to the floor.

Though she didn’t remember what had happened at Deacon’s, her weapon was missing, and that was something she did not want to have to explain—to anyone, let alone Gifford or the policy freaks at OPR.

seventeen

Vail swung the car around and headed back to Deacon’s, taking care to obey the traffic ordinances of the local jurisdiction—actually, she was doing about eighty and swerving all over the road on the wet asphalt. Jesus Christ . . . she had to get there before he left with her Glock. Knowing him, he’d make sure the sidearm was found somewhere embarrassing . . . or he’d put it in the hands of a junkie in the bad part of DC so it would be used in a crime. That wouldn’t go over well with the Bureau. It’d be in all the papers, make national news. She’d be disgraced. And if it was used in a murder . . . how could she live with that?

Vail made it back to his house in a little over five minutes. His car was still in the driveway. She ran to the front door, yanked it open. Deacon was somewhere in the house, singing. Singing? Why the hell is he singing?

Her eyes scanned the room. Didn’t see her Glock anywhere. Knelt down, searched beneath the couch and coffee table when suddenly she heard—

“Looking for this?”

She spun, still on her knees. Deacon was standing there, ten feet away, her Glock in his hand, holding it up as if showing it to her.

“Give it—”

He lowered the pistol and pointed it at her. “Now just a minute, Karen. I don’t think I like your tone. See, I’m holding the goddamn gun here. Understand what that means?”

Oh, she understood all right. She understood that she hated this man. She hated him so much that she envisioned taking her own serrated knife and ramming it through his eyes.

“Stay where you are. On your knees.” He raised his eyebrows in mock excitement. “Hmm. How appropriate.”

No, how infuriating. What to do? Rush him? Too risky. Not yet. She’d give it a bit longer to unfold before acting. It couldn’t get any worse than it was right now, so she had nothing to lose by waiting for, perhaps, a better opportunity.

He unzipped his pants with his left hand and extended his right elbow, the one holding the weapon.

She forced a laugh. “Keep dreaming, Deacon. No fucking way.”

“Funny you should use that vulgar term. You know those pink slips they use in offices that say, ‘While You Were Out’?” He chuckled. “Well, while you were out, I mean, ‘out cold,’ I had some fun.”

He raped me? No—couldn’t be. Could it? She wanted to put her hand on her crotch, feel to see if she was wet. But she wouldn’t give him that. From what she could tell, she didn’t feel any soreness or irritation. “Nice try, asshole. I’d know if you raped me.”

“Rape? Such a strong word, don’t you think? We are married—”

“Only in your warped mind. Divorce is just about done.”

“So maybe I did rape you. And maybe I didn’t.”

She shook her head in disgust. “When did you become such a vile human being?”

“You’re being kind of harsh, Karen. I mean, don’t you deal with a lot worse?”

“It’s just a matter of degree. And believe me, the dividing line between you and those scumbags isn’t that wide. You’re a lot closer to those monsters than you think.”

He stepped closer, wiggled the handgun at her. “How’s your head feel? I hit you pretty hard.”

Is that how I ended up on the floor? He hit me? But she hadn’t seen a bruise on her face—which she would have by now if he’d punched her. Still, her jaw did hurt. She looked up at him. “I’m getting up now, Deacon, and you’re going to hand over my gun.”

“Well, you can get up. Let’s start with that.”

She rose—and in one motion, pivoted on her back heel and swung her leg wide, her left foot side-slamming the Glock and sending it across the room.

She scrambled after it—but so did Deacon—and they both dove forward onto the hardwood like linebackers pursuing a fumble, their bodies colliding and Vail scooping up the weapon with her right hand. She swung it around, and, while on her side, slammed the barrel up against Deacon’s nose. “You goddamn son of a bitch. Were you going to pull the trigger? Huh?”

His eyes crossed as he focused on the Glock.

“I should blow your goddamn brains out, you useless piece of shit!”

“Go ahead, Karen,” he said, unfazed. “Pull the trigger.” He shifted his gaze back to her face. “Throw away your career. Leave Jonathan without parents. Come on, I dare you.”

Her breath was coming in spasms, her heart pounding so forcefully she felt it in her ears. Calm down. Think. She looked into his eyes, seeing the malevolence she often saw in the killers she interviewed in prison. She wasn’t sure what it was, only that she knew it when she saw it: a cold depth, an emotional void.

Vail got to her feet but kept the weapon pointed at Deacon. Her hand was shaking—not out of fear but out of concern she’d lose her nerve and pull the trigger. He was right—she had more at stake than he did. Given his shambles of a life, he would probably embrace suicide if he had the guts to do it.

Vail backed out of the house and didn’t holster the Glock until she sat down in her car. She pulled away from the house and stopped at a light. She felt dirty, poisoned. He didn’t rape me, she told herself. He was just screwing with my head.

Overwhelming unease pulled at her thoughts. The light turned green and she drove on, in the direction of the task force headquarters. She needed to get her head back into the Dead Eyes investigation, to do something useful and productive. To get her mind off Deacon, off what had happened.

When she arrived at the house, a Verizon Communications van was parked out front, no doubt installing the phone lines Bledsoe ordered. Still in a semifog, Vail nearly ran into the technician, who was on his way back to his truck.

As soon as Bledsoe caught sight of her, he opened his mouth to ask the obvious question. She had been so absorbed in her anger she had forgotten to brush her hair or throw on some makeup. I probably look like shit. Bledsoe placed a hand around her shoulders and led her into the room that had once passed as a rudimentary kitchen. He sat her down and stood there looking at her, clearly at a loss about what to do.

A moment passed before he finally grabbed a seat in front of her. She realized he was in cop mode, which would explain why he was keeping his distance.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She didn’t know how to start. “Anyone else around? Manette, Hancock—”

“Came and went. No one else is here. Just us.” Bledsoe gave her a second, but she still didn’t say anything.

She noticed his eyes brighten—she figured the light had come on. Having worked with Vail so closely during the task force’s first tour of duty, Bledsoe knew the garbage she had to navigate during her custody battle with Deacon.

“Your ex, something happen with him?”

Vail nodded.

“Did he touch you?” Bledsoe waited a beat, got no response, and then was out of his chair, hands on his hips, pacing. “You going to file a report? I can write it up, assault, and have him brought in. Scare the shit out of him.”

She thought about it, then shook her head. “Truth is, I don’t know what happened. I went there to talk to him about changing our custody arrangement, and about an hour later I woke up on the floor of his living room.” She hesitated, unsure if she wanted to go any further.

He stopped pacing and pulled his chair beside Vail. He rested his elbows on his knees and looked into her eyes. “You know what happened. It’s enough to file a report. Get it on record.”

“Bledsoe, I don’t know what happened. I can piece things together, make inferences . . . but it’s not the same as knowing. Besides, it doesn’t look good for me to have gone to his place. He’ll just say I started the argument.”

Bledsoe sat there staring at her, then finally asked, “You think he raped you?”

“No.” Bledsoe was a good cop; she knew that—but she had never been on the receiving end of his investigative sensibilities. He had put it all together, perhaps seen something in her body language. He’d been around the block with enough victims to know what had transpired.

“But if you don’t remember what happened, how can you be so sure?”

She tilted her head and gave him a stern look. “I would know if he—if something penetrated me.”

Bledsoe stood up and faced the wall, as if he were studying the accumulated stains and layers of paint drips. Finally, he turned to her. “We gotta nail this guy, Karen. Just file the damn report.”

“Yeah, that’ll go over real well, especially when the investigating dick pulls out his pad and says, ‘So, Agent Vail, tell me what happened. ’ And I say, ‘Gee, detective, I don’t know what happened. I can’t remember.’ Even if he goes the extra mile for the uniform and runs Deacon, how’s it going to look in court? The defense attorney will tear me apart: ‘Are you saying, Agent Vail, that you reported being assaulted, even though you can’t remember actually being struck? Maybe you tripped and fell and hit your head. In fact, you can’t remember anything about what happened, isn’t that true?’” To say nothing about leaving my Glock in his house, then threatening to blow his brains out. She waved a hand. “There’s no case.”

And that’s when it hit her. “The case, shit. That’s what I was supposed to do at ten. Meet with my attorney about Jonathan.” Vail pulled out her cell phone and rescheduled the missed appointment, then called the school to get a message to Jonathan explaining why she hadn’t come for him.

When she hung up, Bledsoe’s face was still crumpled in concentration. “We can bring him in, I can lean on him, get a confession. I know I can, Karen. And even if I don’t, it’ll be worth it just to see him squirm.”

Vail slumped back in her chair. “I’ll deal with this in my own way. Thanks, though. I appreciate the offer.”

Bledsoe regarded her for a moment. “Just don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”

“I’ll let my attorney handle it, okay?” She managed a thin smile. “I’ll only regret it when I get his bill.”

eighteen

After talking with Bledsoe about Deacon’s attack, Vail settled down at the long folding table set up in the living room and began thumbing through the Dead Eyes file. She knew there was something in there she had missed. More than that, however, there was information she had not yet had time to adequately analyze.

Around one thirty, Mandisa Manette arrived with a shoulder bag slung across her back stuffed with files and supplies. She claimed her space in a far corner of the living room, stretched a piece of masking tape marked with her name across a filing cabinet drawer, then began setting out her paperwork and materials. Yellow pushpins held a couple of photos of a young girl to the wall. Other than a nod when she arrived, Vail did not even exchange a glance with her.

Bubba Sinclair was next to arrive, half an hour later. He chatted with Bledsoe for a bit about the Chicago Bears—his hometown team—and then took a spot at the table near the dining room. He set out a couple of picture frames that were facing away from Vail, and an autographed basketball.

Sinclair looked up and said, “We lock this place at night, right?”

“Locked and alarmed,” Bledsoe said. “They installed the system after you left this morning.”

“What’s up with that ball?” Manette asked.

“I helped some on Michael Jordan’s dad’s murder case. Did some legwork for Carolina PD. MJ appreciated the work I done, gave me a signed ball.”

“What’s it for, good luck?”

“Why not? We could use some. If this helps. . . .”

“Hey, rabbit’s feet, lucky charms, no problem,” Manette said. “Just don’t be chanting any incantations, okay? That’s where I draw the line.”

“How about this?” Sinclair pulled a large necklace from beneath his shirt.

“Dare I ask what that is?”

“My lucky hunting necklace.” He fingered the various animal teeth of disparate sizes and shapes strung together on the leather lanyard. “Took out each one of these. Bear, deer, even an elk. That was a tough one.” He found the bear tooth and held it up. “I don’t want to tell you what we had to do to take this one down.”

“Put that thing away,” Manette said. “I like animals.”

“Hey, I like animals, too,” Sinclair said.

Vail sat back and ignored the banter; she was formulating an opinion and needed her concentration.

Within the hour, Robby and Chase Hancock had arrived. They each carved out their own work spaces, with Robby predictably choosing one beside Vail, and Hancock taking a spot in the other room, facing away from her.

“I’ve got something worth looking into,” Vail said once everyone had settled in. They each turned their bodies, or at least their attention, in her direction. “I’ve been trying to understand the significance of stabbing the eyes. It holds a lot of importance to the offender. It’s comforting to him, serves a deep-seated purpose. The fact that he does this as part of his ritual and not his MO tells me it could hold the key to understanding who this guy is.”

“Why’s that?” Bledsoe asked.

“Because he doesn’t have to do it to subdue his victim. She’s already dead,” Hancock said.

Bledsoe turned to Vail for confirmation. She reluctantly nodded.

“So why would this guy stab the eyes?”

“That’s the question. My unit floated some theories last year on vics one and two, but nothing anyone could agree on. But I’ve got this feeling—I mean, theory—that he does it because he has a physical deformity. Scarring on his face, an old wound, acne, harelip, I don’t know exactly, but it’s worth looking into.”

“I’ll do a search,” Sinclair said. “Ex-cons released in the past few years with a history of violent offenses who had a facial disfigurement. We can cross match it against anything we pick up on the blood angle.”

“It’s just a theory,” Vail cautioned.

Bledsoe frowned. “All we’ve got are theories right now.”

Vail dipped her chin in conciliatory agreement.

“While we’re on the topic of symbolism,” Bledsoe said, “what’s up with the hands, what’s that all about?”

“Symbolism ain’t gonna catch us a killer or find us a suspect.” Manette tilted her head toward Vail. “No offense, Kari, but why waste our time with this psycho stuff?”

“Behavioral analysis,” Robby corrected.

“Whatever you wanna call it, it’s like looking into a crystal ball. And we all know there aren’t no crystal balls.”

“The key is narrowing the suspect pool,” Robby said. “To give us a place to focus. With no eyewitnesses or smoking gun forensics, profiling can at least give us a direction. Tell us what kind of guy we’re looking for.”

Bledsoe leaned back in his chair and it let out an ear-piercing squeak. “Right now, we got nothing.” He turned to Vail. “The hands?”

Vail sighed, grateful Robby and Bledsoe had stepped in. She wasn’t in the mood to deal with another confrontation. Her headache had been dulled by Excedrin, but her thoughts still felt a bit fuzzy. She looked over at Manette, who appeared mollified for the moment. “He takes the hand with him as a trophy,” Vail said, “so he can relive the murder in his mind. Relive his fantasy. My guess is he’s probably got pictures, too. Of the vics after he’s done with them, maybe even of the walls, which I think he considers to be works of art.”

“So if these hands fulfill his fantasy, why does he need to kill again?” Sinclair asked.

“For serial killers, the act of killing their victims never lives up to their best fantasies. So they’re constantly refining and perfecting the fantasy. With Dead Eyes, when the hands or photos no longer bring him the excitement or satisfaction of the original act, the urges build and become overwhelming.”

“And that’s when he kills again,” Robby said.

“Exactly. Almost like an addict. Maybe more like a child who wants instant gratification and does whatever he needs to do to satisfy himself. Even if society feels it’s morally wrong.”

“Does he know it’s wrong?”

“On some level, absolutely. But he doesn’t feel any guilt. If he did, he’d cover their faces or bodies. He doesn’t. He leaves them on display, right there in their bed. He doesn’t even bother to move them to the bathtub when he eviscerates them. Doing it in bed has to have special meaning to him.”

“But a hand?” Manette asked. “How’s that a trophy?”

“Like the eyes, the hands have relevance to him. Maybe he had an abusive father who beat him all the time.”

“A left hand from each victim,” Sinclair said. “So to get to him, we find an abusive left-handed father.”

Manette rolled her eyes. “You can’t be serious, Sin. You believe this shit?”

Sinclair ignored her. “Let’s get back to the hand. These whackos really get off on severed hands? I’ve seen whips and chains and shit like that, but a whacked-off hand?”

“Dahmer used to skin the flesh off his victims and preserve their skeletons,” Vail said matter-of-factly. “When looking at the skulls and spines, he saw the victims—as if they were still alive, still there with him. He’d actually masturbate over the skeleton.”

“Jesus,” Robby said.

“And you know this, how?” Manette asked.

“He told us.”

Manette raised her eyebrows. “So naturally we just believed him. After all, he’s an upstanding citizen and all. . . .”

“Okay, let’s keep to the matter at hand,” Bledsoe said. He drew a dirty look from Robby for the pun.

“Sorry, didn’t mean it.” He sat up straight in his chair. “Karen, obviously you’ve got enough now to give us something. Right?” He seemed to be pleading, or at least hoping, that Vail would produce.

Vail looked down at her makeshift desk. A file was open and notes were scrawled on yellow lined paper. “The guy we’re looking for is a Caucasian about thirty to forty years old. Medium build, and according to forensics about five-eight. He works a blue-collar job but may be in business for himself. My bet is he puts a lot of time into stalking his victims because they’re all somewhat similar in age, marital status, and appearance. It’s likely his job gives him a flexible schedule to get all this stuff done. The job might also give him access to either photos or descriptions of the women he chooses. It’s possible he gets their addresses from a database, or he goes out hunting. When he finds one who fits his fantasy, he follows them home. I don’t know enough just yet to say which way he does it. We need to keep working the employee angle.

“He’s bright, above average intelligence. This is a guy who’s into power, so he probably drives a power car. An older German make. Porsche maybe, or Mercedes, red if it’s a Porsche and a dark color if it’s a Mercedes. It’ll be older because he can’t afford a newer one. But age doesn’t matter to him. It’s the illusion.”

“Kind of like sleight of hand, like this hocus-pocus profiling shit,” Manette muttered.

“Go on,” Bledsoe said.

Vail glanced down at her notes. “He’s got some deep-seated issues, as we’ve discussed. First on the list is an abusive childhood. I’m guessing the father since that’s the case ninety percent of the time. The father’s probably left-handed—” she shot a look at Manette—“and he probably beat the offender with his hand. There’s something with his face—maybe a facial deformity, as I mentioned. Maybe even caused by the father during one of the beatings. The eyes are a bit tougher. Could be symbolic, too. Like the father put him down all the time by telling him everyone sees him as a fuck-up.”

Vail looked down at her pad. “There might be something with the blood murals. It’s unlike anything I’ve personally seen before, and VICAP should have a printout for us soon. There’s something there, I know it. Just a gut feeling . . . but we have to keep on that angle. Either this guy had formal art training, or he works in the art field. He might even be a frustrated artist. Painter is the most obvious. But I wouldn’t rule out jobs involving manual labor, where he could tap his creative side. Sculptor, carpenter . . . hell, even poet, musician, or massage therapist.” She stopped for a moment, turned to Bledsoe. “We’re checking out habits common to all the vics, right? Maybe see if they all visited the same massage therapist.”

“Manny and I got that,” Sinclair said. “So far, the only thing we’ve come up with is that two of ’em shopped at the same supermarket chain. Different stores, though. We’re still working on it, there’s a lot of ground to cover.” He flipped the page on his yellow pad and made a note. “We’ll add massage therapists.”

Robby asked, “Make any sense to create a list of people in the fields you mentioned above—sculptors, painters, that type of thing?”

“We’ll end up with a huge database if we don’t narrow it,” Bledsoe said. “Go for it, but don’t give me grief when the computer spits out five thousand names.”

“We can cross-reference it against the other lists.”

“Fine. Do it.”

Sinclair asked Vail, “You said this guy had above average intelligence. How do you know that?”

“First, he gains access to the vic’s houses with relative ease. He either knows them or has found some slick way of disarming them verbally. Typically, offenders who tend toward organization are socially adept; they’ll use slick talk to approach and calm the vic. He might role-play with them, impersonating a cop or security guard to earn their confidence. I’d expect him to be well groomed and in the uniform of the role he takes on.”

“We should continue talking with the vics’ neighbors,” Robby said. “Maybe they’ve seen a stranger in some kind of uniform.”

“So tell me, Kari, what set him off? What happened a year and a half ago to put this guy on the map?”

“Could’ve been a lot of things. Most likely, there was some stressor in his life prior to Marci Evers’s murder. A job change, a relationship gone sour. Some other type of situational stress that happened right before the first murder that set him off. Whatever it was, he reached maximum capacity and popped.”